“For me, no other art form touches life the way the movies do.
—Roger Ebert, from his introduction
Presenting a dazzling selection of writings from a century of film, including
pieces by or about Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, James Dean, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ingmar Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, Gore Vidal, Charlie Chaplin, Terry
McMillan, Tom Wolfe, Pauline Kael, Woody Allen, Akira Kurosawa, Raymond
Chandler, Quentin Tarantino, W. C. Fields, S. J. Perelman, Andy Warhol,
Nathanael West, John Wayne, Julia Phillips, Groucho Marx, Larry McMurtry,
Franpois Truffaut, and yes, Leo Tolstoy.
1. Cary Grant
10. Woody Allen
2.John Wayne
11. Quentin Tarantino
3. Louise Brooks
12. Roger Ebert
4. Akira Kurosawa
13. Leo Tolstoy
5. Doris Day
14. Katharine Hepburn
6. Alfred Hitchcock
15. Frangois Truffaut
7. Orson Welles
16.John Huston
8. Marilyn Monroe
17. Buster Keaton
9. James Dean
18. Charlie Chaplin
ISBN 0-393-04000-3
ROGER EBERT’S BOOK OF FILM
From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the finest
writing from a century of film
Four stars for the most lavish and enter¬
taining anthology of writing on film ever,
assembled by America's best-known and
most trusted movie critic.
If going to the movies has been the
twentieth century’s most popular source of
artistic pleasure, reading about the movies
may not be far behind. For this delicious,
instructive, and vastly enjoyable anthology
Roger Ebert has selected and introduced
an international treasury of more than one-
hundred selections that touch on every
aspect of film-making and film-going.
Here are the stars (Truman Capote on
Marilyn Monroe, Joan Didion on John
Wayne, Tom Wolfe on Cary Grant, Lauren
Bacall on herself), the directors (John
Houseman on Orson Welles, Kenneth
Tynan on Mel Brooks, John Huston
on himself), the makers and shakers (pro¬
ducer Julia Phillips, mogul Darryl F. Zan-
uck, stuntman Joe Bonomo), and the crit¬
ics and theorists (Pauline Kael, Graham
Greene, Andrew Sarris, Susan Sontag).
Here as well are the novelists who have
indelibly captured the experience of movie¬
going in our lives (Walker Percy, James
Agee, Larry McMurtry) and the culture of
the movie business (F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Budd Schulberg, Nathanael West).
Here is a book to get lost in and
return to time and time again—at once a
history, an anatomy, and a loving apprecia¬
tion of the central art form of our time.
Roger Ebert is co-host of Siskel & Ebert,
the top-rated film preview program carried
on two hundred television stations nation¬
wide. He has been the film critic of the
Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, and he is
the only film critic to have won the Pulitzer
Prize for distinguished criticism (1975).
He is the author of the best-selling annual
volume Roger Ebert's Video Companion
and other titles.
Jacket design by Steven Brower Design
Jacket photographs (black & white only)
courtesy of PHOTOFEST
Jacket photographs (color) © Buena Vista Television
Printed in the United States of America
Bogeb Ebebts
Book oe
Eilm
Bogeb Ebebts
Book or
Eilm
Edited by
Bogeb Ebebt
W ■ W -Norton & Company -Nhw York-Lonuon
Copyright © 1997 by The Ebert Company, Ltd.
All rights reserv ed
Printed in the United States of America
Because this page cannot legibly accommodate all copyright notices, pages 783-93 constitute an
extension of the copyright page.
First Edition
The text of this book is composed in 11.5/13 Adobe Perpetua
with the display set in Monotype Felix Titling and typositor Nadall from Solotype.
Composition and Manufacturing by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roger Ebert’s book of film / edited by Roger Ebert,
p. cm.
ISBN 0-393-04.000-3
1. Motion pictures.
PN1994.R5625 1996
791.43—dc2o 96-14271
CIP
W. W. Norton 8c Company, Inc., 300 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
http://web.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton 8c Company Ltd., 10 CopticStreet, London WCiA iPU
234367890
For Aunt Martha,
Who took me to the movies
Contents
Introduction Roger Ebert
Going to the Movies
From A Death in the Family
James Agee 17
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”
Delmore Schwartz 20
From The Bachelor of Arts
R. K. Narayan 27
“The Wizard of Oz”
Terry McMillan 30
From Another Day if Life
Ryszard Kapukdnski 38
From The Moviegoer
Walker Percy 40
From Moving Places
Jonathan Rosenbaum 43
From The Last Picture Show
Larry McMurtry 30
From The Phantom Empire
Geoffrey O’Brien 60
Movie Stars
Rudolph Valentino
Greta Garbo
H. L. Mencken 71
Stark Young 74
7
8
Contents
“They Can’t Take That Away from Me”
From W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes
From The Road to Hollywood
From By Myself
“Bogie in Excelsis”
From Suspects
James Dean
From The Films of My Life
“Ava: Life in the Afternoon”
From Selected Letters
“John Wayne: A Love Song”
“Loverboy of the Bourgeoisie’
“Setsuko Hara”
“Suzie Creamcheese Speaks”
“A Beautiful Child”
From Notes
“Lee Marvin”
From Kinski Uncut
John Belushi
Marcelle Clements
78
Robert Lewis Taylor 82
Bob Hope and Bob Thomas
Lauren Bacall 8 8
Peter Bogdanovich
92
David Thomson 1
°4
Nicholas Ray 110
Francis Truffaut
116
Rex Reed 1 26
John O’Hara 133
Joan Didion 137
Tom Wolfe 144
Donald Ritchie 149
John Updike 132
Truman Capote 1
61
Eleanor Coppola
'73
Roger Ebert 179
Klaus Kinski 187
Mike Royko 193
86
The Business
“The Wahoo Boy”
“The Island of Hollywood”
From Flying through Hollywood by the
Seat of My Pants
From Step Right Up
From Picture
From Get Shorty
From The Player
From Wannabe
Alva Johnston 203
Carey McWilliams 2 16
Sam Arkoff 232
William Castle 237
Lillian Ross 242
Elmore Leonard 249
Michael T olkin 237
Everett Weinberger 260
Concents
9
Sex and Scandal
“Mae West”
John Kobal
271
From Hollywood Babylon
Kenneth Anger 286
“The Awful Fate of the Sex Goddess”
Parker Tyler
291
“Blue Notes”
Brendan Gill
297
“Last Tango in Paris”
Pauline Kael
3°7
“Tango, Last Tango”
Norman Mailer 314
From The Godfather
Mario Puzo
323
Early Days
“Edison’s Vitascope Cheered”
New York Times 339
“The Great Train Robbery”
Philadelphia Inquirer 339
Lumiere
Maxim Gorky 342
A Conversation on Film with Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy 343
“The Nickelodeons”
Joseph Medill Patterson 347
“The Photoplay of Action”
Vachel Lindsay 35 £
From My Autobiography
Charlie Chaplin 339
John Bunny
Djuna Barnes 362
“Pabst and Lulu”
Louise Brooks 366
Mary Pickford
Kevin Brownlow 373
and Gloria Swanson
Kevin Brownlow 377
“Keaton at Venice”
John Gillett and James Blue 379
“I’m Sorry I Made Me Cry”
S. J. Perelman 388
Genres
“Minnie and Mickey” E. M. Forster 397
“The Western: or the American
Film par Excellence" Andre Bazin 400
Contents
i o
“The Gangster as Tragic Hero”
“Underground Films”
“The Imagination of Disaster”
“Libby ‘Noir’ ”
Robert Warshow 407
Manny Farber 412
Susan Sontag 423
Libby Gelman-Waxner 436
Directors
From My Last Sigh
From The Magic Lantern
“My Own Methods”
From A Life in Movies
From Run-through
From Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”
From An Open Book
From My Life and My Films
From Something Like an Autobiography
Stanley Kubrick
“A Long Time on the Little Road”
From Fellini on Fellini
From One Man Tango
Mel Brooks
From POPism
From Sculpting in Time
From Scorsese on Scorsese
From Do the Right Thing
“Frequently Asked Questions about
Quentin Tarantino”
Luis Buiiuel 441
Ingmar Bergman 444
Alfred Hitchcock 447
Michael Powell 453
John Houseman 457
Preston Sturges 463
Woody Allen 470
John Huston 473
Jean Renoir 479
Akira Kurosawa 48 2
Jeremy Bernstein 489
Satyajit Ray 493
Federico Fellini 498
Anthony Quinn 502
Kenneth Tynan £ 11
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett £ 18
Andrei Tarkovsky £ 2 7
Martin Scorsese 5-31
Spike Lee £36
Simon Gleave and Jason Forest £48
W RITERS
From A Child of the Century
“Who Makes the Movies?”
Ben Hecht £££
Gore Vidal £69
Contents
From Prater Violet
From Selected Letters
From Hollywood
Christopher Isherwood j8 i
Raymond Chandler 594
Charles Bukowski 597
Critics
“Memories of a Film Critic”
From On Movies
From Confessions of a Cultist
“Why I’m Not Bored”
From How to Go to the Movies
Graham Greene 61 1
Dwight Macdonald 619
Andrew Sarris 623
Stanley Kauffmann 628
Quentin Crisp 632
Technique
“Matters of Photogenics”
“Movie Boners”
From The Strongman
From Behind the Scenes of “Psycho"
“The Laws of Cartoon Motion”
From Something Like an Autobiography
From On Directing Film
Nestor Almendros 641
Robert Benchley 649
Joe Bonomo 6ji
Janet Leigh 654
Mark O’Donnell 660
Akira Kurosawa 662
David Mamet 668
Hollywood
“Crazy Sunday”
“The Movie People”
“If You Want to Make Movies . .
From Hollywood
From What Makes Sammy Run?
F. Scott Fitzgerald 677
Robert Bloch 692
Blaise Cendrars 702
Gore Vidal 711
Budd Schulberg 722
Contents
I 2
From As Time Goes By
Howard Koch
728
From The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West 73:
From The Memoirs of an Amnesiac
Oscar Levant
737
From The Groucho Letters
From You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This
Groucho Marx
7 S°
Town Again
Julia Phillips
7 J 4
From Children of Light
Robert Stone
768
“Tour of L.A.”
John Waters
770
Appendix
“The Greatest Films of All Time”
Sight and Sound
779
Acknowledgments 783
Introduction
Roger Ebert
The way to criticize a movie, Godard said, is to make one yourself. If he
is right, then the way to assemble a book of the movies would be to fill it with
films, a different one on every page—sideways for wide-screen. I’d like to have
a book like that, but I wouldn’t want to give up reading and writing about movies,
because the best of such writing is not about the movies anyway: It’s about the
author.
Movies strike us in intensely personal ways. Good ones get inside our skins.
I received a letter the other day from a man who said he broke down during the
last ten minutes of Dead Man Walking. There aren’t many movies that can in¬
spire such a powerful reaction, but anyone who loves movies can remember once
or twice when that has happened. For me, it was with Do the Right Thing. And,
many years before that, the first time I saw Kurosawa’s Ikiru.
This anthology begins with the first-person memories of moviegoers. Terry
McMillan, as a young girl in Michigan, wondered why Dorothy would even con¬
sider leaving the Emerald City to go back to Kansas, which, to her, looked all
too much like Michigan. Pauline Kael famously told us, “I lost it at the movies.”
Walker Percy, in my favorite single passage about the movies, wrote: “Other
people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one
climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Cen¬
tral Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in
books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember.
What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he
was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson
Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
i 3
'4
Introduction
I remember the kitten in the doorway too. It was a rainy day in Paris in 1962,
and I was visiting Europe for the first time. A little cinema on the Left Bank was
showing The Third Man, and I went, into the humid cave of Gauloise smoke and
perspiration, and saw the movie for the first time. When Welles made his en¬
trance, I was lost to the movies. In my childhood and adolescence I’d liked the
movies, to be sure, but they were like other forms of entertainment, like books
or the radio, and I didn’t view them as an art form—maybe because 1 wasn’t
seeing very good ones. In 1958, in high school, I saw Citizen Kane for the first
time and understood two things: that a movie could suggest the truth about a
human life and that movies were the expression of the vision of those who made
them. I went back again and again to the cozy little Art Theater in Cham¬
paign—Urbana, Illinois, to see Bergman and Fellini, Cassavetes, and the Angry
Young Men. Those experiences gave me a background in good movies, and then,
when the kitten rubbed against the big black shoe, I understood the whole story.
For me, no other art form touches life the way the movies do.
Gathering the pieces for this book took place over a couple of years. I deter¬
mined at the outset not to make any rules, not to try for some sort of “survey”
suitable for a classroom. I was simply looking for good writing about the movies.
With five or six exceptions, every selection comes from a book I found on my
own shelves. I put in what I enjoyed and admired. I’m particularly pleased with
some of the more obscure choices. When Joe Bonomo describes a stunt going
horribly wrong, you can see an injured man hanging from a rope ladder, swing¬
ing to his doom. I am amazed that Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, and Vachel Lind¬
say knew so much, so early, about what the movies really were. Donald Ritchie’s
piece about Setsuko Hara expresses how we feel that we possess movie stars,
who are not allowed to break free from our love. Ben Hecht is wonderfully
brazen as he explains to Capone’s henchmen why Scarface is not about Scarface.
I am grateful to Gerald Howard, my editor at Norton, for guidance and in¬
spiration. And to Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic of the Chicago Reader, for sev¬
eral suggestions, including Delmore Schwartz and Maxim Gorky. Many thanks
to my assistant, Carol Iwata, for help in assembling the materials. And great love
to my wife, Chaz, who likes the movies as much as 1 do—which is just as well,
considering how many we see.
Going to the
Movies
James Agee
James Agee was a generalist whose writings often seemed to circle back to the movies. He was
a film critic for Time and the Nation, he wrote screenplays (The African Queen and
four others), he wrote essays for Life (John Huston, silent comedians), and not surprisingly
his only novel, A Death in the Family, opens with a boy and hisfother going to the movies.
from A Death in the Family
At supper that night, as many times before, his father said, “Well, spose we go
to the picture show.”
“Oh, Jay!” his mother said. “That horrid little man!”
“What’s wrong with him?” his father asked, not because he didn’t know what
she would say; but so she would say it.
“He’s so nastyl” she said, as she always did. “So vulgarl With his nasty little
cane; hooking up skirts and things, and that nasty little walk!”
His father laughed, as he always did, and Rufus felt that it had become rather
an empty joke; but as always the laughter also cheered him; he felt that the laugh¬
ter enclosed him with his father.
They walked downtown in the light of mother-of-pearl, to the Majestic, and
found their way to seats by the light of the screen, in the exhilarating smell of
stale tobacco, rank sweat, perfume and dirty drawers, while the piano played
fast music and galloping horses raised a grandiose flag of dust. And there was
William S. Hart with both guns blazing and his long, horse face and his long,
hard lip, and the great country rode away behind him as wide as the world. Then
he made a bashful face at a girl and his horse raised its upper lip and everybody
laughed, and then the screen was filled with a city and with the sidewalk of a
side street of a city, a long line of palms and there was Charlie; everyone laughed
the minute they saw him squattily walking with his toes out and his knees wide
apart, as if he were chafed; Rufus’ father laughed, and Rufus laughed too. This
17
i 8
Going to the Movies
time Charlie stole a whole bag of eggs and when a cop came along he hid them
in the seat of his pants. Then he caught sight of a pretty woman and he began to
squat and twirl his cane and make silly faces. She tossed her head and walked
away with her chin up high and her dark mouth as small as she could make it
and he followed her very busily, doing all sorts of things with his cane that made
everybody laugh, but she paid no attention. Finally she stopped at a corner to
wait for a streetcar, turning her back to him, and pretending he wasn’t even
there, and after trying to get her attention for a while, and not succeeding, he
looked out at the audience, shrugged his shoulders, and acted as if she wasn’t
there. But after tapping his foot for a little, pretending he didn’t care, he be¬
came interested again, and with a charming smile, tipped his derby; but she only
stiffened, and tossed her head again, and everybody laughed. Then he walked
back and forth behind her, looking at her and squatting a little while he walked
very quietly, and everybody laughed again; then he flicked hold of the straight
end of his cane and, with the crooked end, hooked up her skirt to the knee, in
exactly the way that disgusted Mama, looking very eagerly at her legs, and
everybody laughed very loudly; but she pretended she had not noticed. Then
he twirled his cane and suddenly squatted, bending the cane and hitching up his
pants, and again hooked up her skirt so that you could see the panties she wore,
ruffled almost like the edges of curtains, and everybody whooped with laugh¬
ter, and she suddenly turned in rage and gave him a shove in the chest, and he
sat down straight-legged, hard enough to hurt, and everybody whooped again;
and she walked haughtily away up the street, forgetting about the streetcar, “mad
as a hornet!” as his father exclaimed in delight; and there was Charlie, flat on his
bottom on the sidewalk, and the way he looked, kind of sickly and disgusted,
you could see that he suddenly remembered those eggs, and suddenly you re¬
membered them too. The way his face looked, with the lip wrinkled off the teeth
and the sickly little smile, it made you feel just the way those broken eggs must
feel against your seat, as queer and awful as that time in the white pekay suit,
when it ran down out of the pants-legs and showed all over your stockings and
you had to walk home that way with people looking; and Rufus’ father nearly
tore his head off laughing and so did everybody else, and Rufus was sorry for
Charlie, having been so recently in a similar predicament, but the contagion of
laughter was too much for him, and he laughed too. And then it was even fun¬
nier when Charlie very carefully got himself up from the sidewalk, with that
sickly look even worse on his face, and put his cane under one arm, and began
to pick at his pants, front and back, very carefully, with his little fingers crooked,
as if it were too dirty to touch, picking the sticky cloth away from his skin. Then
he reached behind him and took out the wet bag of broken eggs and opened it
and peered in; and took out a broken egg and pulled the shell disgustedly apart,
letting the elastic yolk slump from one half shell into the other, and dropped it,
shuddering. Then he peered in again and fished out a whole egg, all slimy with
Delmore Schwartz
i 9
broken yolk, and polished it off carefully on his sleeve, and looked at it, and
wrapped it in his dirty handkerchief, and put it carefully into the vest pocket of
his little coat. Then he whipped out his cane from under his armpit and took
command of it again, and with a final look at everybody, still sickly but at the
same time cheerful, shrugged his shoulders and turned his back and scraped back¬
ward with his big shoes at the broken shells and the slimy bag, just like a dog,
and looked back at the mess (everybody laughed again at that) and started to walk
away, bending his cane deep with every shuffle, and squatting deeper, with his
knees wider apart, than ever before, constantly picking at the seat of his pants
with his left hand, and shaking one foot, then the other, and once gouging deep
into his seat and then pausing and shaking his whole body, like a wet dog, and
then walking on; while the screen shut over his small image a sudden circle of
darkness: then the player-piano changed its tune, and the ads came in motion¬
less color. They sat on into the William S. Hart feature to make sure why he
had killed the man with the fancy vest—it was astheyhadexpectedby her fright¬
ened, pleased face after the killing; he had insulted a girl and cheated her father
as well—and Rufus’ father said, “Well, reckon this is where we came in,” but
they watched him kill the man all over again; then they walked out.
It was full dark now, but still early; Gay Street was full of absorbed faces; many
of the store windows were still alight. Plaster people, in ennobled postures, stiffly
wore untouchably new clothes; there was even a little boy, with short, straight
pants, bare knees and high socks, obviously a sissy: but he wore a cap, all the
same, not a hat like a baby. Rufus’ whole insides lifted and sank as he looked at
the cap and he looked up at his father; but his father did not notice; his face was
wrapped in good humor, the memory of Charlie. Remembering his rebuff of a
year ago, even though it had been his mother, Rufus was afraid to speak of it.
His father wouldn’t mind, but she wouldn’t want him to have a cap, yet. If he
asked his father now, his father would say no, Charlie Chaplin was enough.
Delmore Schwartz
The narrator imagines himself inside a movie theater, watching a film of his parents’
courtship and being moved to tears and alarm by his knowledge of the way their story turns
out. He sees them as in a silent film; they talk, but in no more words than could be car-
20
Going to the Movies
ried on title cards, and the individual images—a young man’s call on his sweetheart’s
family, a visit to Coney Island—are familiarfrom countless films. Yet these are his par¬
ents, and so he cannot enjoy the film in the simple way urged by those seated around him.
This story by Delmore Schwartz (1913—1966) appeared as the first item of fiction in the
first issue of Partisan Review in 1937, and here is James Atlas, writing about the great
impact it had at the time: "But what can the audience do about it? The past revived must
obey its own unfolding, true to the law of mistakes. The reel must run its course; it can¬
not be cut; it cannot be edited. ’’
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”
I
I think it is the year 1909.1 feel as if I were in a motion picture theatre, the long
arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen.
This is a silent picture as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed
in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sud¬
den jumps. The actors too seem to jump about and walk too fast. The shots
themselves are full of dots and rays, as if it were raining when the picture was
photographed. The light is bad.
It is Sunday afternoon, June 1 2th, 1909, and my father is walking down the
quiet streets of Brooklyn on his way to visit my mother. His clothes are newly
pressed and his tie is too tight in his high collar. He jingles the coins in his pock¬
ets, thinking of the witty things he will say. I feel as if I had by now relaxed en¬
tirely in the soft darkness of the theatre; the organist peals out the obvious and
approximate emotions on which the audience rocks unknowingly. I am anony¬
mous, and I have forgotten myself. It is always so when one goes to the movies,
it is, as they say, a drug.
My father walks from street to street of trees, lawns and houses, once in a
while coming to an avenue on which a street-car skates and gnaws, slowly pro¬
gressing. The conductor, who has a handle-bar mustache, helps a young lady
wearing a hat like a bowl with feathers on to the car. She lifts her long skirts
slightly as she mounts the steps. He leisurely makes change and rings his bell. It
is obviously Sunday, for everyone is wearing Sunday clothes, and the street-car’s
noises emphasize the quiet of the holiday. Is not Brooklyn the City of Churches?
The shops are closed and their shades drawn, but for an occasional stationery
store or drug-store with great green balls in the window.
My father has chosen to take this long walk because he likes to walk and think.
He thinks about himself in the future and so arrives at the place he is to visit in
Delmore Schwartz
2 i
a state of mild exaltation. He pays no attention to the houses he is passing, in
which the Sunday dinner is being eaten, nor to the many trees which patrol each
street, now coming to their full leafage and the time when they will room the
whole street in cool shadow. An occasional carriage passes, the horse’s hooves
falling like stones in the quiet afternoon, and once in a while an automobile, look¬
ing like an enormous upholstered sofa, puffs and passes.
My father thinks of my mother, of how nice it will be to introduce her to his
family. But he is not yet sure that he wants to marry her, and once in a while
he becomes panicky about the bond already established. He reassures himself
by thinking of the big men he admires who are married: William Randolph
Hearst, and William Howard Taft, who has just become President of the United
States.
My father arrives at my mother’s house. He has come too early and so is sud¬
denly embarrassed. My aunt, my mother’s sister, answers the loud bell with her
napkin in her hand, for the family is still at dinner. As my father enters, my grand¬
father rises from the table and shakes hands with him. My mother has run up¬
stairs to tidy herself. My grandmother asks my father if he has had dinner, and
tells him that Rose will be downstairs soon. My grandfather opens the conver¬
sation by remarking on the mild June weather. My father sits uncomfortably near
the table, holding his hat in his hand. My grandmother tells my aunt to take my
father’s hat. My uncle, twelve years old, runs into the house, his hair tousled.
He shouts a greeting to my father, who has often given him a nickel, and then
runs upstairs. It is evident that the respect in which my father is held in this house¬
hold is tempered by a good deal of mirth. He is impressive, yet he is very awk¬
ward.
II
Finally my mother comes downstairs, all dressed up, and my father being en¬
gaged in conversation with my grandfather becomes uneasy, not knowing
whether to greet my mother or continue the conversation. He gets up from the
chair clumsily and says “hello” gruffly. My grandfather watches, examining their
congruence, such as it is, with a critical eye, and meanwhile rubbing his bearded
cheek roughly, as he always does when he reflects. He is worried; he is afraid
that my father will not make a good husband for his oldest daughter. At this point
something happens to the film, just as my father is saying something funny to
my mother; I am awakened to myself and my unhappiness just as my interest
was rising. The audience begins to clap impatiently. Then the trouble is cared
for but the film has been returned to a portion just shown, and once more 1 see
my grandfather rubbing his bearded cheek and pondering my father’s charac-
22 Going to the Movies
ter. It is difficult to get back into the picture once more and forget myself, but
as my mother giggles at my father’s words, the darkness drowns me.
My father and mother depart from the house, my father shaking hands with
my mother once more, out of some unknown uneasiness. I stir uneasily also,
slouched in the hard chair of the theatre. Where is the older uncle, my mother’s
older brother? He is studying in his bedroom upstairs, studying for his final ex¬
amination at the College of the City of New York, having been dead of rapid
pneumonia for the last twenty-one years. My mother and father walk down the
same quiet streets once more. My mother is holding my father’s arm and telling
him of the novel which she has been reading; and my father utters judgments of
the characters as the plot is made clear to him. This is a habit which he very much
enjoys, for he feels the utmost superiority and confidence when he approves and
condemns the behavior of other people. At times he feels moved to utter a brief
“Ugh”—whenever the story becomes what he would call sugary. This tribute is
paid to his manliness. My mother feels satisfied by the interest which she has
awakened; she is showing my father how intelligent she is, and how interesting.
They reach the avenue, and the street-car leisurely arrives. They are going
to Coney Island this afternoon, although my mother considers that such plea¬
sures are inferior. She has made up her mind to indulge only in a walk on the
boardwalk and a pleasant dinner, avoiding the riotous amusements as being be¬
neath the dignity of so dignified a couple.
My father tells my mother how much money he has made in the past week,
exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated. But my father
has always felt that actualities somehow fall short. Suddenly I begin to weep.
The determined old lady who sits next to me in the theatre is annoyed and looks
at me with an angry face, and being intimidated, I stop. I drag out my handker¬
chief and dry my face, licking the drop which has fallen near my lips. Meanwhile
I have missed something, for here are my mother and father alighting at the last
stop, Coney Island.
Ill
They walk toward the boardwalk, and my father commands my mother to in¬
hale the pungent air from the sea. They both breathe in deeply, both of them
laughing as they do so. They have in common a great interest in health, although
my father is strong and husky, my mother frail. Their minds are full of theories
of what is good to eat and not good to eat, and sometimes they engage in heated
discussions of the subject, the whole matter ending in my father’s announcement,
made with a scornful bluster, that you have to die sooner or later anyway. On
the boardwalk’s flagpole, the American flag is pulsing in an intermittent wind
from the sea.
Delmore Schwartz
23
My father and mother go to the rail of the boardwalk and look down on the
beach where a good many bathers are casually walking about. A few are in the
surf. A peanut whistle pierces the air with its pleasant and active whine, and my
father goes to buy peanuts. My mother remains at the rail and stares at the ocean.
The ocean seems merry to her; it pointedly sparkles and again and again the pony
waves are released. She notices the children digging in the wet sand, and the
bathing costumes of the girls who are her own age. My father returns with the
peanuts. Overhead the sun’s lightning strikes and strikes, but neither of them
are at all aware of it. The boardwalk is full of people dressed in their Sunday
clothes and idly strolling. The tide does not reach as far as the boardwalk, and
the strollers would feel no danger if it did. My mother and father lean on the
rail of the boardwalk and absently stare at the ocean. The ocean is becoming
rough; the waves come in slowly, tugging strength from far back. The moment
before they somersault, the moment when they arch their backs so beautifully,
showing green and white veins amid the black, that moment is intolerable. They
finally crack, dashing fiercely upon the sand, actually driving, full force down¬
ward, against the sand, bouncing upward and forward, and at last petering out
into a small stream which races up the beach and then is recalled. My parents
gaze absentmindedly at the ocean, scarcely interested in its harshness. The sun
overhead does not disturb them. But I stare at the terrible sun which breaks up
sight, and the fatal, merciless, passionate ocean, I forget my parents. I stare fas¬
cinated and finally, shocked by the indifference of my father and mother, I burst
out weeping once more. The old lady next to me pats me on the shoulder and
says: “There, there, all of this is only a movie, young man, only a movie,” but I
look up once more at the terrifying sun and the terrifying ocean, and being un¬
able to control my tears, I get up and go to the men’s room, stumbling over the
feet of the other people seated in my row.
IV
When I return, feeling as if I had awakened in the morning sick for lack of sleep,
several hours have apparently passed and my parents are riding on the merry-
go-round. My father is on a black horse, my mother on a white one, and they
seem to be making an eternal circuit for the single purpose of snatching the nickel
rings which are attached to the arm of one of the posts. A hand-organ is play¬
ing; it is one with the ceaseless circling of the merry-go-round.
For a moment it seems that they will never get off the merry-go-round be¬
cause it will never stop. I feel like one who looks down on the avenue from the
joth story of a building. But at length they do get off; even the music of the hand-
organ has ceased for a moment. My father has acquired ten rings, my mother
only two, although it was my mother who really wanted them.
*4
Going to the Movies
They walk on along the boardwalk as the afternoon descends by impercepti¬
ble degrees into the incredible violet of dusk. Everything fades into a relaxed
glow, even the ceaseless murmuring from the beach, and the revolutions of the
merry-go-round. They look for a place to have dinner. My father suggests the
best one on the boardwalk and my mother demurs, in accordance with her prin¬
ciples.
However, they do go to the best place, asking for a table near the window,
so that they can look out on the boardwalk and the mobile ocean. My father feels
omnipotent as he places a quarter in the waiter’s hand as he asks for a table. The
place is crowded and here too there is music, this time from a kind of string trio.
My father orders dinner with a fine confidence.
As the dinner is eaten, my father tells of his plans for the future, and my
mother shows with expressive face how interested she is, and how impressed.
My father becomes exultant. He is lifted up by the waltz that is being played,
and his own future begins to intoxicate him. My father tells my mother that he
is going to expand his business, for there is a great deal of money to be made.
He wants to settle down. After all, he is twenty-nine, he has lived by himself
since he was thirteen, he is making more and more money, and he is envious of
his married friends when he visits them in the cozy security of their homes, sur¬
rounded, it seems, by the calm domestic pleasures, and by delightful children,
and then, as the waltz reaches the moment when all the dancers swing madly,
then, then with awful daring, then he asks my mother to marry him, although
awkwardly enough and puzzled, even in his excitement, at how he had arrived
at the proposal, and she, to make the whole business worse, begins to cry, and
my father looks nervously about, not knowing at all what to do now, and my
mother says: “It’s all I’ve wanted from the moment I saw you,” sobbing, and he
finds all of this very difficult, scarcely to his taste, scarcely as he had thought it
would be, on his long walks over Brooklyn Bridge in the revery of a fine cigar,
and it was then that I stood up in the theatre and shouted: “Don’t do it. It’s not
too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only
remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”
The whole audience turned to look at me, annoyed, the usher came hurrying
down the aisle flashing his searchlight, and the old lady next to me tugged me
down into my seat, saying: “Be quiet. You’ll be put out, and you paid thirty-
five cents to come in.” And so I shut my eyes because I could not bear to see
what was happening. I sat there quietly.
V
But after awhile I begin to take brief glimpses, and at length I watch again with
thirsty interest, like a child who wants to maintain his sulk although offered the
Delmore Schwartz
2 5
bribe of candy. My parents are now having their picture taken in a photogra¬
pher’s booth along the boardwalk. The place is shadowed in the mauve light
which is apparently necessary. The camera is set to the side on its tripod and
looks like a Martian man. The photographer is instructing my parents in how to
pose. My father has his arm over my mother’s shoulder, and both of them smile
emphatically. The photographer brings my mother a bouquet of flowers to hold
in her hand but she holds it at the wrong angle. Then the photographer covers
himself with the black cloth which drapes the camera and all that one sees of
him is one protruding arm and his hand which clutches the rubber ball which he
will squeeze when the picture is finally taken. But he is not satisfied with their
appearance. He feels with certainty that somehow there is something wrong in
their pose. Again and again he issues from his hidden place with new directions.
Each suggestion merely makes matters worse. My father is becoming impatient.
They try a seated pose. The photographer explains that he has pride, he is not
interested in all of this for the money, he wants to make beautiful pictures. My
father says: “Hurry up, will you? We haven’t got all night.” But the photogra¬
pher only scurries about apologetically, and issues new directions. The photog¬
rapher charms me. I approve of him with all my heart, for I know just how he
feels, and as he criticizes each revised pose according to some unknown idea of
rightness, I become quite hopeful. But then my father says angrily: “Come on,
you’ve had enough time, we’re not going to wait any longer.” And the photog¬
rapher, sighing unhappily, goes back under his black covering, holds out his hand,
says: “One, two, three, Now!”, and the picture is taken, with my father’s smile
turned to a grimace and my mother’s bright and false. It takes a few minutes for
the picture to be developed and as my parents sit in the curious light they be¬
come quite depressed.
VI
They have passed a fortune-teller’s booth, and my mother wishes to go in, but
my father does not. They begin to argue about it. My mother becomes stub¬
born, my father once more impatient, and then they begin to quarrel, and what
my father would like to do is walk off and leave my mother there, but he knows
that that would never do. My mother refuses to budge. She is near to tears,
but she feels an uncontrollable desire to hear what the palm-reader will say.
My father consents angrily, and they both go into a booth which is in a way
like the photographer’s, since it is draped in black cloth and its light is shad¬
owed. The place is too warm, and my father keeps saying this is all nonsense,
pointing to the crystal ball on the table. The fortune-teller, a fat, short woman,
garbed in what is supposed to be Oriental robes, comes into the room from
the back and greets them, speaking with an accent. But suddenly my father feels
26
Going to the Movies
that the whole thing is intolerable; he tugs at my mother’s arm, but my mother
refuses to budge. And then, in terrible anger, my father lets go of my mother’s
arm and strides out, leaving my mother stunned. She moves to go after my fa¬
ther, but the fortune-teller holds her arm tightly and begs her not to do so,
and I in my seat am shocked more than can ever be said, for I feel as if I were
walking a tight-rope a hundred feet over a circus-audience and suddenly the
rope is showing signs of breaking, and I get up from my seat and begin to shout
once more the first words I can think of to communicate my terrible fear and
once more the usher comes hurrying down the aisle flashing his searchlight, and
the old lady pleads with me, and the shocked audience has turned to stare at
me, and I keep shouting: “What are they doing? Don’t they know what they
are doing? Why doesn’t my mother go after my father? If she does not do that,
what will she do? Doesn’t my father know what he is doing?”—But the usher
has seized my arm and is dragging me away, and as he does so, he says: “What
are you doing? Don’t you know that you can’t do whatever you want to do?
Why should a young man like you, with your whole life before you, get hys¬
terical like this? Why don’t you think of what you’re doing? You can’t act like
this even if other people aren’t around! You will be sorry if you do not do what
you should do, you can’t carry on like this, it is not right, you will find that
out soon enough, everything you do matters too much,” and he said that drag¬
ging me through the lobby of the theatre into the cold light, and I woke up
into the bleak winter morning of my 2 1 st birthday, the windowsill shining with
its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.
K . K. Naflayan
R. K. Narayan (1906— ), who was one of Graham Greene’s favorite novelists, has never
received the popularity he deserves. He writes about the daily lives of small shopkeepers,
professionals, educators, and civil servants in an India where circumspection is a way of
life. Here is an ordinary enough scene, about two friends going to the movies, that sug¬
gests not only why they are going but what they are escaping.
R . K.. N a t ay a n
27
from The Bachelor of Arts
They walked to the cinema. Chandran stopped at a shop to buy some betel leaves
and a packet of cigarettes. Attending a night show was not an ordinary affair.
Chandran was none of your business-like automatons who go to the cinema, sit
there, and return home. It was an aesthetic experience to be approached with
due preparation. You must chew the betel leaves and nut, chew gently, until
the heart was stimulated and threw out delicate beads of perspiration and caused
a fine tingling sensation behind the ears; on top of that you must light a ciga¬
rette, inhale the fumes, and with the night breeze blowing on your perspiring
forehead, go to the cinema, smoke more cigarettes there, see the picture, and
from there go to an hotel nearby for hot coffee at midnight, take some more
betel leaves and cigarettes, and go home and sleep. This was the ideal way to
set about a night show. Chandran squeezed the maximum aesthetic delight out
of the experience, and Ramu’s company was most important to him. It was his
presence that gave a sense of completion to things. He too smoked, chewed,
drank coffee, laughed (he was the greatest laugher in the world), admired Chan¬
dran, ragged him, quarrelled with him, breathed delicious scandal over the
names of his professors and friends and unknown people.
The show seemed to have already started, because there was no crowd out¬
side the Select Picture House. It was the only theatre that the town possessed,
a long hall roofed with corrugated iron sheets. At the small ticket-window
Chandran inquired, “Has the show begun?”
“Yes, just,” said the ticket man, giving the stock reply.
You might be three-quarters of an hour late, yet the man at the ticket win¬
dow would always say, “Yes, just.”
“Hurry up, Ramu,” Chandran cried as Ramu slackened his pace to admire a
giant poster in the narrow passage leading to the four-annas entrance.
The hall was dark; the ticket collector at the entrance took their tickets and
held apart the curtains. Ramu and Chandran looked in, seeking by the glare of
the picture on the screen for vacant seats. There were two seats at the farthest
end. They pushed their way across the knees of the people already seated. “Head
down!” somebody shouted from a back seat, as two heads obstructed the screen.
Ramu and Chandran stooped into their seats.
It was the last five minutes of a comic in which Jas Jim was featured. That fat
genius, wearing a ridiculous cap, was just struggling out of a paint barrel.
Chandran clicked his tongue in despair: “What a pity. I didn’t know there
was a Jas two-reeler with the picture. We ought to have come earlier.”
Ramu sat rapt. He exploded with laughter. “What a genius he is!” Chandran
28
Going to the Movies
murmured as Jas got on his feet, wearing the barrel around his waist like a kilt.
He walked away from Chandran, but turned once to throw a wink at the spec¬
tators, and, taking a step back, stumbled and fell, and rolled off, and the pic¬
ture ended. A central light was switched on. Chandran and Ramu raised
themselves in their seats, craned their necks, and surveyed the hall.
The light went out again, the projector whirred. Scores of voices read aloud
in a chorus, “Godfrey T. Memel presents Vivian Troilet and Georgia Lomb in
LightgunsofLauro. . .’’and then came much unwanted information about the peo¬
ple who wrote the story, adapted it, designed the dresses, cut the film to its
proper length, and so on. Then the lyrical opening: “Nestling in the heart of the
Mid-West, Lauro city owed its tranquillity to the eagle-eyed sheriff-then
a scene showing a country girl (Vivian Troilet) wearing a check skirt, going up
a country lane. Thus started, though with a deceptive quietness, it moved at a
breathless pace, supplying love, valour, villainy, intrigue, and battle in enormous
quantities for a whole hour. The notice “Interval” on the screen, and the lights
going up, brought Chandran and Ramu down to the ordinary plane. The air was
thick with tobacco smoke. Ramu yawned, stood up, and gazed at the people oc¬
cupying the more expensive seats behind them. “Chandar, Brown is here with
some girl in the First Class.”
“May be his wife,” Chandran commented without turning.
“It is not his wife.”
“Must be some other girl, then. The white fellows are bom to enjoy life. Our
people really don’t know how to live. If a person is seen with a girl by his side,
a hundred eyes stare at him and a hundred tongues comment, whereas no Eu¬
ropean ever goes out without taking a girl with him.”
“This is a wretched country,” Ramu said with feeling.
At this point Chandran had a fit of politeness. He pulled Ramu down, saying
that it was very bad manners to stand up and stare at the people in the back seats.
Lights out again. Some slide advertisements, each lasting a second.
“Good fellow, he gets through these inflictions quickly,” said Chandran.
“For each advertisement he gets twenty rupees a month.”
“No, it is only fifteen.”
“But somebody said that it was twenty.”
“It is fifteen rupees. You can take it from me,” Chandran said.
“Even then, what a fraud! Not one stays long enough. I hardly take in the full
name of that baby’s nourishing food, when they tell me what I ought to smoke.
Idiots. I hate advertisements.”
The advertisements ended and the story started again from where it had been
left off. The hero smelt the ambush ten yards ahead. He took a short cut, climbed
a rock, and scared the ruffians from behind. And so on and on it went, through
fire and water, and in the end the good man Lomb always came out triumphant;
Terry McMillan
29
he was an upright man, a courageous man, a handsome man, and a strong man,
and he had to win in the end. Who could not foresee it? And yet every day at
every show the happy end was awaited with breathless suspense. Even the old
sheriff (all along opposed to the union of Vivian with Georgie) was suddenly
transformed, and with tears in his eyes he placed her hands on his. There was a
happy moment before the end, when the lovers’ heads were shown on an im¬
mense scale, their lips welded in a kiss. Good-night.
Lights on. People poured out of the exits, sleepy, yawning, rubbing their
smarting eyes. This was the worst part of the evening, this trudge back home,
all the way from the Select Picture House to Lawley Extension. Two or three
cars sounded their horns and started from the theatre.
“Lucky rascals. They will be in their beds in five minutes. When I start earn¬
ing I shall buy a car first of all. Nothing like it. You can just see the picture and
go straight to bed. ”
“Coffee?” Chandran asked, when they passed a brightly lit coffee hotel.
“I don’t much care.”
“Nor do I.”
They walked in silence for the most part, occasionally exchanging some very
dull, languid jokes.
As soon as his house was reached, Ramu muttered, “Good-night. See you to¬
morrow,” and slipped through his gate.
Chandran walked on alone, opened the gate silently, woke up his younger
brother sleeping in the hall, had the hall door opened, and fumbled his way to
his room. He removed his coat in the dark, flung it on a chair, kicked a roll of
bedding on the floor, and dropped down on it and closed his eyes even before
the bed had spread out.
TER.R.Y McMillan
This memoir is a reminder of how intensely children experience films. Most movies prob¬
ably slide right past, but when one really touches a child, it becomes part of its life and
interacts with the other parts. McMillan interweaves her daily existence in a small Michi¬
gan town with Dorothy’s adventures in Oz, finding that lessons can be applied in both
3°
Going to the Movies
directions. Is there a hint of the story line if Waiting to Exhale in her observation that
Dorothy should have chosen the Emerald City over Kansas? "She could make new cityfriends
and get a hobby and a boyfriend and free rent and never have to do chores. ...”
“The Wizard of Oz”
I grew up in a small industrial town in the thumb of Michigan: Port Huron. We
had barely gotten used to the idea of color TV. I can guess how old I was when
I first saw The Wizard of Oz on TV because I remember the house we lived in
when I was still in elementary school. It was a huge, drafty house that had a fire¬
place we never once lit. We lived on two acres of land, and at the edge of the
backyard was the woods, which I always thought of as a forest. We had weep¬
ing willow trees, plum and pear trees, and blackberry bushes. We could not see
into our neighbors’ homes. Railroad tracks were part of our front yard, and the
house shook when a train passed—twice, sometimes three times a day. You
couldn’t hear the TV at all when it zoomed by, and I was often afraid that if it
ever flew off the tracks, it would land on the sun porch, where we all watched
TV. I often left the room during this time, but my younger sisters and brother
thought I was just scared. I think I was in the third grade around this time.
It was a raggedy house which really should’ve been condemned, but we fixed
it up and kept it clean. We had our German shepherd, Prince, who slept under
the rickety steps to the side porch that were on the verge of collapsing but never
did. I remember performing a ritual whenever Oz was coming on. I either baked
cookies or cinnamon rolls or popped popcorn while all five of us waited for
Dorothy to spin from black and white on that dreary farm in Kansas to the lu¬
minous land of color of Oz.
My house was chaotic, especially with four sisters and brothers and a mother
who worked at a factory, and if I’m remembering correctly, my father was there
for the first few years of the Oz (until he got tuberculosis and had to live in a
sanitarium for a year). I do recall the noise and the fighting of my parents (not
to mention my other relatives and neighbors). Violence was plentiful, and I
wanted to go wherever Dorothy was going where she would not find trouble.
To put it bluntly, I wanted to escape because I needed an escape.
I didn’t know any happy people. Everyone I knew was either angry or not
satisfied. The only time they seemed to laugh was when they were drunk, and
even that was short-lived. Most of the grown-ups I was in contact with lived their
lives as if it had all been a mistake, an accident, and they were paying dearly for
it. It seemed as if they were always at someone else’s mercy—women at the
McMillan
Terry
3 i
mercy of men (this prevailed in my hometown) and children at the mercy of
frustrated parents. All I knew was that most of the grown-ups felt trapped, as
if they were stuck in this town and no road would lead out. So many of them
felt a sense of accomplishment just getting up in the morning and making it
through another day. I overheard many a grown-up conversation, and they were
never life-affirming: “Chile, if the Lord’ll just give me the strength to make it
through another week . . “I just don’t know how I’ma handle this, I can’t
take no more. ...” I rarely knew what they were talking about, but even a fool
could hear that it was some kind of drudgery. When I was a child, it became ap¬
parent to me that these grown-ups had no power over their lives, or, if they did,
they were always at a loss as to how to exercise it. I did not want to grow up
and have to depend on someone else for my happiness or be miserable or have
to settle for whatever I was dished out—if I could help it. That much I knew al¬
ready.
I remember being confused a lot. 1 could never understand why no one had
any energy to do anything that would make them feel good, besides drinking.
Being happy was a transient and very temporary thing which was almost always
offset by some kind of bullshit. I would, of course, learn much later in my own
adult life that these things are called obstacles, barriers—or again, bullshit.
When I started writing, I began referring to them as “knots.” But life wasn’t one
long knot. It seemed to me it just required stamina and common sense and the
wherewithal to know when a knot was before you and you had to dig deeper
than you had in order to figure out how to untie it. It could be hard, but it was
simple.
The initial thing I remember striking me about Oz was how nasty Dorothy’s Aun¬
tie Em talked to her and everybody on the farm. I was used to that authorita¬
tive tone of voice because my mother talked to us the same way. She never asked
you to do anything; she gave you a command and never said “please,” and, once
you finished it, rarely said “thank you.” The tone of her voice was always hos¬
tile, and Auntie Em sounded just like my mother—bossy and domineering. They
both ran the show, it seemed, and I think that because my mother was raising
five children almost single-handedly, I must have had some inkling that being a
woman didn’t mean you had to be helpless. Auntie Em’s husband was a wimp,
and for once the tables were turned: he took orders from her! My mother and
Auntie Em were proof to me that if you wanted to get things done you had to
delegate authority and keep everyone apprised of the rules of the game as well
as the consequences. In my house it was punishment—you were severely
grounded. What little freedom we had was snatched away. As a child, I often
felthelpless, powerless, because I had no control over my situation and couldn’t
32 Going to the Movies
tell my mother when I thought (or knew) she was wrong or being totally un¬
fair, or when her behavior was inappropriate. I hated this feeling to no end, but
what was worse was not being able to do anything about it except keep my mouth
shut.
So I completely identified when no one had time to listen to Dorothy. That
dog’s safety was important to her, but no one seemed to think that what Dorothy
was saying could possibly be as urgent as the situation at hand. The bottom line
was, it was urgent to her. When I was younger, I rarely had the opportunity to
finish a sentence before my mother would cut me off or complete it for me, or,
worse, give me something to do. She used to piss me off, and nowadays I catch
myself—stop myself—from doing the same thing to my seven-year-old. Back
then, it was as if what 1 had to say wasn’t important or didn’t warrant her un¬
divided attention. So when Dorothy’s Auntie Em dismisses her and tells her to
find somewhere where she’ll stay out of trouble, and little Dorothy starts think¬
ing about if there in fact is such a place—one that is trouble free—I was right
there with her, because I wanted to know, too.
I also didn’t know or care that Judy Garland was supposed to have been a child
star, but when she sang “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” I was impressed. Im¬
pressed more by the song than by who was singing it. I mean, she wasn’t ex¬
actly Aretha Franklin or the Marvelettes or the Supremes, which was the only
vocal music I was used to. As kids, we often laughed at white people singing on
TV because their songs were always so corny and they just didn’t sound any¬
thing like the soulful music we had in our house. Sometimes we would mimic
people like Doris Day and Fred Astaire and laugh like crazy because they were
always so damn happy while they sang and danced. We would also watch square¬
dancing when we wanted a real laugh and try to look under the women’s dresses.
What I hated more than anything was when in the middle of a movie the white
people always had to start singing and dancing to get their point across. Later,
I would hate it when black people would do the same thing—even though it was
obvious to us that at least they had more rhythm and, most of the time, more
range vocally.
We did skip through the house singing “We’re off to see the Wizard,” but
other than that, most of the songs in this movie are a blank, probably because 1
blanked them out. Where I lived, when you had something to say to someone,
you didn’t sing it, you told them, so the cumulative effect of the songs wore
thin.
I was afraid for Dorothy when she decided to run away, but at the same time
I was glad. I couldn’t much blame her—I mean, what kind of life did she have,
from what I’d seen so far? She lived on an ugly farm out in the middle of nowhere
with all these old people who did nothing but chores, chores, and more chores.
Who did she have to play with besides that dog? And even though I lived in a
Terry McMillan
11
house full of people, I knew how lonely Dorothy felt, or at least how isolated
she must have felt. First of all, 1 was the oldest, and my sisters and brother were
ignorant and silly creatures who often bored me because they couldn’t hold a
decent conversation. I couldn’t ask them questions, like: Why are we living in
this dump? When is Mama going to get some more money? Why can’t we go
on vacations like other people? Like white people? Why does our car always
break down? Why are we poor? Why doesn’t Mama ever laugh? Why do we
have to live in Port Huron? Isn’t there someplace better than this we can go live?
1 remember thinking this kind of stuff in kindergarten, to be honest, because
times were hard, but I’d saved twenty-five cents in my piggy bank for hot-dog-
and-chocolate-milk day at school, and on the morning I went to get it, my piggy
bank was empty. My mother gave me some lame excuse as to why she had to
spend it, but all I was thinking was that I would have to sit there (again) and watch
the other children slurp their chocolate milk, and I could see the ketchup and
mustard oozing out of the hot-dog bun that I wouldn’t get to taste. I walked to
school, and with the exception of walking to my father’s funeral when I was six¬
teen, this was the longest walk of my entire life. My plaid dress was starched
and my socks were white, my hair was braided and not a strand out of place;
but I wanted to know why I had to feel this kind of humiliation when in fact I
had saved the money for this very purpose. Why? By the time I got to school,
I’d wiped my nose and dried my eyes and vowed not to let anyone know that I
was even moved by this. It was no one’s business why I couldn’t eat my hot dog
and chocolate milk, but the irony of it was that my teacher, Mrs. Johnson, must
have sensed what had happened, and she bought my hot dog and chocolate milk
for me that day. I can still remember feeling how unfair things can be, but how
they somehow always turn out good. I guess seeing so much negativity had al¬
ready started to turn me into an optimist.
I was a very busy child, because I was the oldest and had to see to it that my
sisters and brother had their baths and did their homework; I combed my sis¬
ters’ hair, and by fourth grade I had cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner. It was
my responsibility to keep the house spotless so that when my mother came home
from work it would pass her inspection, so I spent many an afternoon and Sat¬
urday morning mopping and waxing floors, cleaning ovens and refrigerators,
grocery shopping, and by the time I was thirteen, I was paying bills for my mother
and felt like an adult. I was also tired of it, sick of all the responsibility. So yes,
I rooted for Dorothy when she and Toto were vamoosing, only I wanted to
know: Where in the hell was she going? Where would I go if I were to run away?
I had no idea because there was nowhere to go. What I did know was that one
day I would go somewhere—which is why I think I watched so much TV. I was
always on the lookout for Paradise, and I think I found it a few years later on
“Adventures in Paradise,” with Gardner McKay, and on “77 Sunset Strip.” Palm
34
Going to the Movies
trees and blue water and islands made quite an impression on a little girl from
a flat, dull little depressing town in Michigan.
Professor Marvel really pissed me off, and I didn’t believe for a minute that
that crystal ball was real, even before he started asking Dorothy all those ques¬
tions, but I knew this man was going to be important, I just couldn’t figure out
how. Dorothy was so gullible, I thought, and I knew this word because my
mother used to always drill it in us that you should “never believe everything
somebody tells you.” So after Professor Marvel convinced Dorothy that her Aun¬
tie Em might be in trouble, and Dorothy scoops up Toto and runs back home,
I was totally disappointed, because now I wasn’t going to have an adventure. I
was thinking I might actually learn how to escape drudgery by watching Dorothy
do it successfully, but before she even gave herself the chance to discover for
herself that she could make it, she was on her way back home. “Dummy!” we
all yelled on the sun porch. “Dodo brain!”
The storm. The tornado. Of course, now the entire set of this film looks so
phony it’s ridiculous, but back then I knew the wind was a tornado because in
Michigan we had the same kind of trapdoor underground shelter that Auntie Em
had on the farm. I knew Dorothy was going to be locked out once Auntie Em
and the workers locked the door, and I also knew she wasn’t going to be heard
when she knocked on it. This was drama at its best, even though I didn’t know
what drama was at the time.
In the house she goes, and I was frightened for her. I knew that house was
going to blow away, so when little Dorothy gets banged in the head by a win¬
dow that flew out of its casement, I remember all of us screaming. We watched
everybody fly by the window, including the wicked neighbor who turns out to
be the Wicked Witch of the West, and I’m sure I probably substituted my
mother for Auntie Em and fantasized that all of my siblings would fly away, too.
They all got on my nerves because I could never find a quiet place in my house—
no such thing as peace—and I was always being disturbed.
It wasn’t so much that I had so much I wanted to do by myself, but I already
knew that silence was a rare commodity, and when I managed to snatch a few
minutes of it, I could daydream, pretend to be someone else somewhere else—
and this was fun. But I couldn’t do it if someone was bugging me. On days when
my mother was at work, I would often send the kids outside to play and lock
them out, just so I could have the house to myself for at least fifteen minutes. I
loved pretending that none of them existed for a while, although after I finished
with my fantasy world, it was reassuring to see them all there. I think I was
grounded.
When Dorothy’s house began to spin and spin and spin, I was curious as to
where it was going to land. And to be honest, I didn’t know little Dorothy
was
actually dreaming until she woke up and opened the door and everything was
Terry McMillan
3S
in color! It looked like Paradise to me. The foliage was almost an iridescent
green, the water bluer than I’d ever seen in any of the lakes in Michigan. Of
course, once I realized she was in fact dreaming, it occurred to me that this very
well might be the only way to escape. To dream up another world. Create your
own.
I had no clue that Dorothy was going to find trouble, though, even in her
dreams. Hell, if I had dreamed up something like another world, it would’ve
been a perfect one. I wouldn’t have put myself in such a precarious situation.
I’d have been able to go straight to the Wizard, no strings attached. First of all,
that she walked was stupid to me; I would’ve asked one of those Munchkins for
a ride. And I never bought into the idea of those slippers, but once I bought the
whole idea, I accepted the fact that the girl was definitely lost and just wanted
to get home. Personally, all I kept thinking was, if she could get rid of that
Wicked Witch of the West, the Land of Oz wasn’t such a bad place to be stuck
in. It beat the farm in Kansas.
At the time, I truly wished I could spin away from my family and home and
land someplace as beautiful and surreal as Oz—if only for a little while. All I
wanted was to get a chance to see another side of the world, to be able to make
comparisons, and then decide if it was worth coming back home.
What was really strange to me, after the Good Witch of the North tells
Dorothy to just stay on the Yellow Brick Road to get to the Emerald City and
find the Wizard so she can get home, was when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow,
the Tin Man, and the Lion—all of whom were missing something I’d never even
given any thought to. A brain? What did having one really mean? What would
not having one mean? I had one, didn’t I, because I did well in school. But be¬
cause the Scarecrow couldn’t make up his mind, thought of himself as a failure,
it dawned on me that having a brain meant you had choices, you could make de¬
cisions and, as a result, make things happen. Yes, I thought, I had one, and I was
going to use it. One day. And the Tin Man, who didn’t have a heart. Not hav¬
ing one meant you were literally dead to me, and I never once thought of it as
being the house of emotions (didn ’ t know what emotions were), where feelings
of jealousy, devotion, and sentiment lived. I’d never thought of what else a heart
was good for except keeping you alive. But I did have feelings, because they were
often hurt, and I was envious of the white girls at my school who wore mohair
sweaters and box-pleat skirts, who went skiing and tobogganing and yachting
and spent summers in Quebec. Why didn’t white girls have to straighten their
hair? Why didn’t their parents beat each other up? Why were they always so
goddamn happy?
And courage. Oh, that was a big one. What did having it and not having it
mean? I found out that it meant having guts and being afraid but doing whatever
it was you set out to do anyway. Without courage, you couldn’t do much of
36
Going to the Movies
anything. I liked courage and assumed I would acquire it somehow. As a mat¬
ter of fact, one day my mother told me to get her a cup of coffee, and even though
my heart was pounding and I was afraid, I said to her pointblank, “Could you
please say please?” She looked up at me out of the comer of her eye and said,
“What?” So I repeated myself, feelingmore powerful because she hadn’t slapped
me across the room already, and then something came over her and she looked
at me and said, “Please.” I smiled all the way to the kitchen, and from that point
forward, I managed to get away with this kind of behavior until I left home when
I was seventeen. My sisters and brother—to this day—don’t know how I stand
up to my mother, but I know. I decided not to be afraid or intimidated by her,
and 1 wanted her to treat me like a friend, like a human being, instead of her
slave.
I do believe that Oz also taught me much about friendship. I mean, the Tin
Man, the Lion, and the Scarecrow hung in there for Dorothy, stuck their “necks”
out and made sure she was protected, even risked their own “lives” for her. They
told each other the truth. They trusted each other. All four of them had each
other’s best interests in mind. I believe it may have been a while before I actu¬
ally felt this kind of sincerity in a friend, but really good friends aren’t easy to
come by, and when you find one, you hold on to them.
Okay. So Dorothy goes through hell before she gets back to Kansas. But the
bottom line was, she made it. And what I remember feeling when she clicked
those heels was that you have to have faith and be a believer, for real, or noth¬
ing will ever materialize. Simple as that. And not only in life but even in your
dreams there’s always going to be adversity, obstacles, knots, or some kind of
bullshit you’re going to have to deal with in order to get on with your life.
Dorothy had a good heart and it was in the right place, which is why I supposed
she won out over the evil witch. I’ve learned that one, too. That good always
overcomes evil; maybe not immediately, but in the long run, it does. So I think
I vowed when 1 was little to try to be a good person. An honest person. To care
about others and not just myself. Not to be a selfish person, because my heart
would be of no service if I used it only for myself. And 1 had to have the courage
to see other people and myself as not being perfect (yes, I had a heart and a brain,
but some other things would turn up missing, later), and 1 would have to learn
to untie every knot that I encountered—some self-imposed, some not—in my
life, and to believe that if I did the right things, I would never stray too far from
my Yellow Brick Road.
I’m almost certain that I saw Oz annually for at least five or six years, but I don’t
remember how old 1 was when I stopped watching it. I do know that by the time
my parents were divorced (I was thirteen), I couldn’t sit through it again. I was
Terry McMillan
37
a mature teen-ager and had finally reached the point where Dorothy got on my
nerves. Singing, dancing, and skipping damn near everywhere was so corny and
utterly sentimental that even the Yellow Brick Road became sickening. I already
knew what she was in for, and sometimes I rewrote the story in my head. I kept
asking myself, what if she had just run away and kept going, maybe she would ’ ve
ended up in Los Angeles with a promising singing career. What if it had turned
out that she hadn’t been dreaming, and the Wizard had given her an offer she
couldn’t refuse—say, for instance, he had asked her to stay on in the Emerald
City, that she could visit the farm whenever she wanted to, but, get a clue,
Dorothy, the Emerald City is what’s happening; she could make new city friends
and get a hobby and a boyfriend and free rent and never have to do chores . . .
I had to watch The Wizard of Oz again in order to write this, and my six-and-
a-half-year-old son, Solomon, joined me. At first he kept asking me if some¬
thing was wrong with the TV because it wasn’t in color, but as he watched, he
became mesmerized by the story. He usually squirms or slides to the floor and
under a table or just leaves the room if something on TV bores him, which it
usually does, except if he’s watching Nickelodeon, a high-quality cable kiddie
channel. His favorite shows, which he watches with real consistency, and, I
think, actually goes through withdrawal if he can’t see them for whatever rea¬
son, are “Inspector Gadget,” “Looney Tunes,” and “Mr. Ed.” “Make the Grade,”
which is sort of a junior-high version of “Jeopardy,” gives him some kind of thrill,
even though he rarely knows any of the answers. And “Garfield” is a must on
Saturday morning. There is hardly anything on TV that he watches that has any
real, or at least plausible, drama to it, but you can’t miss what you’ve never
had.
The Wicked Witch intimidated the boy no end, and he was afraid of her. The
Wizard was also a problem. So I explained—no, I just told him pointblank—
“Don’t worry, she’ll get it in the end, Solomon, because she’s bad. And the Wiz¬
ard’s a fake, and he’s trying to sound like a tough guy, but he’s a wus.” That of¬
fered him some consolation, and even when the Witch melted he kind of looked
at me with those Home Alone eyes and asked, “But where did she go, Mommy?”
“She’s history,” I said. “Melted. Gone. Into the ground. Remember, this is pre¬
tend. It’s not real. Real people don’t melt. This is only TV,” I said. And then
he got that look in his eyes as if he’d remembered something.
Of course he had a nightmare that night and of course there was a witch in
it, because I had actually left the sofa a few times during this last viewing to smoke
a few cigarettes (the memory bank is a powerful place—I still remembered many
details), put the dishes in the dishwasher, make a few phone calls, water the
plants. Solomon sang “We’re off to see the Wizard” for the next few days be¬
cause he said that was his favorite part, next to the Munchkins (who also showed
up in his nightmare).
38
Going to the Movies
So, to tell the truth, I really didn’t watch the whole movie again. I just
couldn ’ t. Probably because about thirty or so years ago little Dorothy had made
a lasting impression on me, and this viewing felt like overkill. You only have to
tell me, show me, once in order for me to get it. But even still, the movie it¬
self taught me a few things that I still find challenging. That it’s okay to be an
idealist, that you have to imagine something better and go for it. That you have
to believe in something, and it’s best to start with yourself and take it from there.
At least give it a try. As corny as it may sound, sometimes I am afraid of what’s
around the comer, or what’s not around the comer. But I look anyway. I be¬
lieve that writing is one of my “corners”—an intersection, really; and when I’m
confused or reluctant to look back, deeper, or ahead, I create my own Emerald
Cities and force myself to take longer looks, because it is one sure way that I’m
able to see.
Of course, I’ve fallen, tumbled, and been thrown over all kinds of bumps on
my road, but it still looks yellow, although every once in a while there’s still a
loose brick. For the most part, though, it seems paved. Perhaps because that’s
the way I want to see it.
/ /
Kyszakd Kapuscinski
Whenever people are where they wish not to be, or feel ill at ease, or are lonely or far from
home, a movie theater can provide an escape not just because of the images on the screen
but also because of the reassuring ritual of simply buying a ticket and going in and sit¬
ting down and knowing that for an hour or two decisions can be def.erred.
from Another Day of Life
And in Luanda? What can you do on Sunday in our abandoned city, upon
which—as it turns out—sentence has already been passed? You can sleep until
noon.
Walker Percy
39
You can turn on the faucet to check—ha!—just in case there is water.
You can stand before the mirror, thinking: so many gray hairs in my beard
already.
You can sit in front of a plate on which lies a piece of disgusting fish and a
spoonful of cold rice.
You can walk, sweating from weakness and effort, up the Rua de Luis de
Camoes, toward the airport or down toward the bay.
And yet that’s not all—you can go to the movies, too! That’s right, because
we still have a movie theater, only one in fact, but it is panoramic and in the
open air and, to top it off, free. The theater lies in the northern part of town,
near the front. The owner fled to Lisbon but the projectionist remained behind,
and so did a print of the famous porno film Emmanuelle. The projectionist shows
it uninterrupted, over and over, gratis, free for everyone, and crowds of kids
rush in, and soldiers who have got away from the front, and there’s always a full
house, a crush, and an uproar and indescribable bellowing. To enhance the ef¬
fect, the projectionist stops the action at the hottest moments. The girl is
naked—stop. He has her in the airplane—stop. She has her by the river—stop.
The old man has her—stop. The boxer has her—stop. If he has her in an absurd
position—laughter and bravos from the audience. If he has her in a position of
exaggerated sophistication, the audience falls silent and analyzes. There’s so
much merriment and hubbub that it is hard to hear the distant, heavy echoes of
artillery on the nearby front. And of course there is no way—not because of
Emmanuelle, but the great distance—to hear the roaring motors of the armored
column moving along the road.
Walker. Per.cy
What Walker Percy’s famous novel captures above all is the way some people live so com¬
pletely through the movies that they come not only to prefer them to real life but to make
them into a higher reality. His passage beginning "Other people, so 1 have read . . .’’is
subtle in the way it sneaks in the words "so 1 have read, ” informing us that the narrator
is comparing two forms of vicarious entertainment and has few actual experiences of his
40
Going to the Movies
own to measure up against either of them. That is his plight. It is revealing that when
he meets the real William Holden, he has no desire to approach him. It is enough to look.
from The Moviegoer
Life in Gentilly is very peaceful. I manage a small branch office of my uncle’s
brokerage firm. My home is the basement apartment of a raised bungalow be¬
longing to Mrs. Schexnaydre, the widow of a fireman. I am a model tenant and
a model citizen and take pleasure in doing all that is expected of me. My wallet
is full of identity cards, library cards, credit cards. Last year I purchased a flat
olive-drab strongbox, very smooth and heavily built with double walls for fire
protection, in which I placed my birth certificate, college diploma, honorable
discharge, G.I. insurance, a few stock certificates, and my inheritance: a deed
to ten acres of a defunct duck club down in St. Bernard Parish, the only relic of
my father’s many enthusiasms. It is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citi¬
zen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one’s name on
it certifying, so to speak, one’s right to exist. What satisfaction I take in appearing
the first day to get my auto tag and brake sticker! I subscribe to Consumer Reports
and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, an all but silent air con¬
ditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink. I pay atten¬
tion to all spot announcements on the radio about mental health, the seven signs
of cancer, and safe driving—though, as I say, I usually prefer to ride the bus.
Yesterday a favorite of mine, William Holden, delivered a radio announcement
on litterbugs. “Let’s face it,” said Holden, “Nobody can do anything about it—
but you and me.” This is true. I have been careful ever since.
In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Week-ends I
often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has per¬
manent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs
So Little. The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other peo¬
ple, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one
climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Cen¬
tral Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in
books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember.
What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he
was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson
Welles in the doorway in The Third Man. . . .
Walker Percy
41
I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal
Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags
like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep
sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle.
Today lam in luck. Who should come out of Pirate’s Alley half a block ahead
of me but William Holden!
Holden crosses Royal and turns toward Canal. As yet he is unnoticed. The
tourists are either browsing along antique shops or snapping pictures of bal¬
conies. No doubt he is on his way to Galatoire’s for lunch. He is an attractive
fellow with his ordinary good looks, very suntanned, walking along hands in
pockets, raincoat slung over one shoulder. Presently he passes a young couple,
who are now between me and him. Now we go along, the four of us, not
twenty feet apart. It takes two seconds to size up the couple. They are twenty,
twenty-one, and on their honeymoon. Not Southern. Probably Northeast. He
wears a jacket with leather elbow patches, pipestem pants, dirty white shoes,
and affects the kind of rolling seafaring gait you see in Northern college boys.
Both are plain. He has thick lips, cropped reddish hair and skin to match. She is
mousy. They are not really happy. He is afraid their honeymoon is too conven¬
tional, that they are just another honeymoon couple. No doubt he figured it
would be fun to drive down the Shenandoah Valley to New Orleans and escape
the honeymooners at Niagara Falls and Saratoga. Now fifteen hundred miles from
home they find themselves surrounded by couples from Memphis and Chicago.
He is anxious; he is threatened from every side. Each stranger he passes is a re-
proach to him, every doorway a threat. What is wrong? he wonders. She is un¬
happy but for a different reason, because he is unhappy and she knows it but
doesn’t know why.
Now they spot Holden. The girl nudges her companion. The boy perks up
for a second, but seeing Holden doesn’t really help him. On the contrary. He
can only contrast Holden’s resplendent reality with his own shadowy and pre¬
carious existence. Obviously he is more miserable than ever. What a deal, he
must be thinking, trailing along behind a movie star—we might just as well be
rubbernecking in Hollywood.
Holden slaps his pockets for a match. He has stopped behind some ladies look¬
ing at iron furniture on the sidewalk. They look like housewives from Hatties¬
burg come down for a day of shopping. He asks for a match; they shake their
heads and then recognize him. There follows much blushing and confusion. But
nobody can find a match for Holden. By now the couple have caught up with
him. The boy holds out a light, nods briefly to Holden’s thanks, then passes on
without a flicker of recognition. Holden walks along between them for a sec¬
ond; he and the boy talk briefly, look up at the sky, shake their heads. Holden
gives them a pat on the shoulder and moves on ahead.
42
Going to the Movies
The boy has done it! He has won title to his own existence, as plenary an ex¬
istence now as Holden’s, by refusing to be stampeded like the ladies from Hat¬
tiesburg. He is a citizen like Holden; two men of the world they are. All at once
the world is open to him. Nobody threatens from patio and alley. His girl is open
to him too. He puts his arm around her neck, noodles her head. She feels the
difference too. She had not known what was wrong nor how it was righted but
she knows now that all is well.
Holden has turned down Toulouse shedding light as he goes. An aura of
heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it. Now every¬
one is aware of him. He creates a regular eddy among the tourists and barkeeps
and B-girls who come running to the doors of the joints.
I am attracted to movie stars but not for the usual reasons. I have no desire
to speak to Holden or get his autograph. It is their peculiar reality which astounds
me. The Yankee boy is well aware of it, even though he pretends to ignore
Holden. Clearly he would like nothing better than to take Holden over to his
fraternity house in the most casual way. “Bill, I want you to meet Phil. Phil, Bill
Holden,” he would say and go sauntering off in the best seafaring style.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum, who is one of America’s most important film critics, has for some
years written for the Chicago Reader. Before that he lived a nomadic life, viewing movies
and writing about them in Paris, London, and many other places. And bfore that, we
learn with a certain surprise, he grew up in Florence, Alabama, where his grandfather
once owned movie theaters probably not much different from those attended by the hero
of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. These words, written for the Venice Biennale in 1 979
as both home video and the multiplex were first appearing on the American scene, are a
poignant look at how we used to go to the movies and how our habits were about to
change.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
43
from Moving Places
Rocky Horror Playtime vs. Shopping Mall Home
Seven weeks ago, when I received a call from Adriano Apra in Rome inviting
me to speak at this conference, I was in my hometown, Florence, Alabama,
where my parents live today. I have moved with all my belongings seventeen
times in the past twenty years, and I will have to find and move to yet another
place in New York as soon as I return from this conference. Nevertheless, I con¬
sider myself unusually fortunate, fortunate not only in being here—in this city
and this country for the first time in my life—but in having a hometown to re¬
turn to year after year: a fixed reference point. And fortunate in being the
grandson of the man who ran most of the local movie theaters when I was grow¬
ing up, which meant that I had virtually unlimited access to most of what was
shown.
Moving Places is an attempt at a narrative exposition of myself through movies
and of movies through me, and Florence has been providing me with a sort of
personal and historical measuring stick in this process. So when Adriano told
me that I was to speak about audiences in the 1980s, I naturally thought first
about the audiences in Florence, what they were and what they are, which is
my most reliable guide to what they will be.
I have to admit that Florence has undergone radical social changes since 1 left
in 1959. The town is now racially integrated, which wasn’t the case when I was
growing up. Today black people in Florence don’t have to attend separate
schools, use separate bathrooms (in the nearest train station one facility was la¬
beled “colored women,” the other “white ladies”), or drink from separate drink¬
ing fountains. State law no longer requires them to sit in the back of a bus or in
a special section of a movie theater.
Another drastic change is that downtown Florence is dying, perhaps almost
dead. The center of town, where three of my grandfather’s theaters once
stood—each of them only a block or so from where the courthouse used to be—
now seems deserted. Despite lots of brand new parking lots, the place feels
haunted, like a ghost town. The largest of the three theaters, the Shoals—built
when I was five and originally seating 1300 people—is the only one standing
today. It still shows movies; I saw Meatballs there three days after Adriano
phoned. But it no longer functions as anything like the place of worship or the
community gathering-place that it was twenty and thirty years ago.
The cashier’s booth at the Shoals used to have two windows, one around the
corner from the other, in order to conform to the Jim Crow laws. The window
44
Going to the Movies
directly in front of the cashier was for selling tickets to white folks; the one on
her left was for black customers, who had already come into the building through
a special side entrance. At the side window they would purchase “colored” tick¬
ets, which were ten or fifteen cents cheaper than “white” tickets, and climb their
own set of stairs to their own special section of the balcony.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, making Jim Crow laws ille¬
gal, some of the old habits were allowed to linger for a period. Both windows
in the cashier’s booth at the Shoals remained open, and for a while she contin¬
ued to sell cheaper tickets at the side window. In theory, any black person could
pay more and sit downstairs, and any white person could pay less and sit up¬
stairs. Today the balcony is closed and has been for years; everyone sits down¬
stairs, in fewer and wider seats, generally watching worse movies for more
money.
In fact a theater like the Shoals is little more than a relic now, and everyone
knows this, including the subsequent owners, who have tried to bring some as¬
pects of the building “up to date” and in doing so have eliminated whatever in¬
clinations toward beauty, monumentality, or eccentricity that may once have
been in the design. The only movies the Shoals shows now are bland items such
as Meatballs and Disney comedies, and a lot of the older kids wouldn’t be caught
dead there. Their turf is the strip on the outskirts of town where all the shop¬
ping centers and one enormous shopping mall are located.
And that is where the other movie theaters are, the brand new ones whose
auditoriums have the feel of the insides of cheap jewelry boxes, where I saw
Moonraker, a couple of sex films, Dracula, and The Muppet Movie in late July. As
a rule, the people I know in Florence who see movies today watch them either
out there, in those frigid space stations that are as strictly utilitarian as circus
tents and offer even less of an invitation to linger after the show, or on their TV
sets at home. (Cable TV, I should add, is very popular.)
I suspect that most American audiences in the 1980s will be watching films ei¬
ther in homes or in shopping malls. What’s particularly disturbing about this is
that homes and shopping malls are beginning to resemble one another, along with
the movies and the audiences inside them. The separate forms of social behav¬
ior that we associate with film and television are also starting to break down as
the two media become increasingly difficult to differentiate, thanks in part to
such expensive toys as Betamaxes and Advent screens. The arsenals of new
communications equipment, which are currently being paraded before us like
sophisticated armaments, indirectly yet unmistakably testify to the poverty of
what we have to communicate. By trusting ourselves less, we wind up trusting
the machines more. And because of these machines, word-of-mouth news trav-
Jonathan Rosenbaum
45
els more slowly these days, as though it were creeping from one petulant me¬
dieval stronghold to another—in striking contrast to the sixties, when certain
kinds of news traveled like wildfire.
It is estimated that nearly half of all the retail business in the United States
today is transacted in approximately 1 8,000 strip and enclosed shopping com¬
plexes known variously as plazas, centers, and malls. They occupy over two bil¬
lion square feet, employ more than 4.5 million people, represent $60 billion in
investments, and their rate of failure over the past twenty-five years is said to
be less than one percent.
A study conducted at Temple University indicates that malls are the most pop¬
ular gathering places for teenagers in the United States. In a controversial paper
presented to the Popular Culture Association, Richard Francaviglia compared
malls to amusement parks such as Disneyland. William Severini Kowinski ex¬
pands on this notion by describing malls as “the feudal castles of contemporary
America.”
By keeping weather out and keeping itself always in the present—if not in the
future—a mall aspires to create timeless space. Removed from everything else
and existing in a world of its own, a mall is also placeless space.
An article in the socialist magazine Dollars &^Sense points out that in recent
years the U .S. Supreme Court has twice ruled in separate cases that malls are
not public places where citizens can express their views, distribute leaflets, or
congregate freely—unlike the old town squares.
To keep people inside the mall and encourage them to see shopping as enter¬
tainment, designers attempt to create a “carnival” atmosphere! Once inside a cen¬
ter, shoppers have few decisions to make. Corners are kept to a minimum so the
customers will flow along from store to store, propelled, as the developers say,
by “retail energy.” Said one observer of mall design. “The mirrors, the music and
the sound of rushing water create a sense of distortion. There is never a clock to
remind one of the world outside the mall.”
I think this is a pretty fair description of most of the cinema today. Both films
and shopping malls function as media that aim at producing and controlling their
own notions and measurements of space and time, designed to supersede all oth¬
ers. They offer themselves to us like self-contained planets, not tools to assist
us anywhere else in the universe .Which suggests that we may be losing our mar¬
bles.
In these terms, Apocalypse Now —which I saw twice last month in New York—
is a $ 30 million shopping mall, offering Michael Herr’s Dispatches as well as Con-
+6
Going to the Movies
rad’s Heart of Darkness in the bookstore, The Doors and Wagner in the record
and tape shop, Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper in the snazzy nightclub, Play¬
boy, Time, Rolling Stone, and Reader’s Digest at the newsstand, fancy roast beef and
plain rice at the fast-food restaurant. To make sure that all of this goes down
well, a clever pattern of continuous percussion and exotic jungle noise is pumped
seductively into our ears like Muzak, controlling our inner rhythms and emo¬
tional temperatures while helping to screen out all vestiges of the outside world,
including Vietnam.
To refer to such an all-purpose marketing and environmental complex as a
personal form of self-expression, and to try to reduce or elevate this expression
to a political statement of any sort, is merely to become a blind man in relation
to Francis Coppola’s elephant—and perhaps part of the film’s promotional cam¬
paign in the bargain. In order to confront anything like the whole package (which
is so much bigger than we are) one first has to acknowledge the presence of a
complex pleasure machine, loads of fun, programmed to stimulate and then grat¬
ify as many opposing viewpoints as possible. This machine has nothing to do with
Vietnam. It is designed to appeal to good ole boys who kill gooks for the fun of
it as well as to pacifists, liberals, blacks, whites, moderates, fascists, conserva¬
tives, humanitarians, racists, misanthropes, novelists, avant-garde filmmakers,
rock and drug enthusiasts, and literature professors—all of whom are designed,
in turn, to feel that it’s a movie made just for them.
In the same context, what about homes, which are the only spaces we have
left once we’ve rejected public life for a private boat ride through Coppolaland?
Writer-director George Romero his on a parodic relationship of home to shop¬
ping mall in the first two parts of his horror trilogy, Night of the Living Dead and
Dawn of the Dead, by passing directly from the home as fortress to the shopping
mall fortress as home. An alternative version of this interchange—the home as
shopping mall—can easily be imagined if one starts with either of Hugh Hefner’s
Playboy Mansions as a model.
Having outlined such a deprived and limited future, I would like to cite a cou¬
ple of things that still make me hopeful, in spite of everything. Both of these
things signal the potential return of the active audience, in contrast to the pas¬
sive, refrigerated, cut-off, narcissistic sensibilities that so many recent movies
and movie theaters take (or ask) us to be. And both imply (albeit somewhat
subversively in the present context) a community of common interests inside
a theater, rather than a set of separate, elegantly upholstered masturbation
stalls.
Decentered, nonprivileged space and a crowd of people contriving to reclaim
what is rightfully theirs is what both these things are about. One of them is my
Jonathan Rosenbaum
47
favorite film, Playtime, made by Jacques Tati in the sixties, which I saw first in
1968 as an American tourist in Paris. The other is an event created by an audi¬
ence around a film called The Rocky Horror Picture Show, an event that has been oc¬
curring and evolving in the United States over the past three years.
Playtime was made twelve years ago, although as a practical tool for learning
how to cope with the hideous world that we’re building it is only beginning to
be understood. When I screened it for 1 jo college students in San Diego two
years ago, I was pleased to discover that many of them had less trouble under¬
standing its basic principles than most film critics did when the movie first ap¬
peared—perhaps because they had fewer preconceptions about film comedy.
Turning us all into tourists as it charts the movements of a group of Americans
through a studio approximation of Paris, Playtime implies that empty space be¬
comes alive ( and curved) once it assumes a social function—and that the short¬
est distance between any two supposedly unrelated individuals within the same
public space is comedy.
The film’s strategy, lesson, and advice are the same: It directs us to look
around at the world we live in (the one we keep building), then at each other,
and to see how funny that relationship is and how many brilliant possibilities we
still have in a shopping-mall world that perpetually suggests otherwise; to look
and see that there are many possibilities and that the play between them, acti¬
vated by the dance of our gaze, can become a kind of comic ballet, one that we
both observe and perform as we navigate our way through Paris’s imprisoning
patterns, reflections, and deceptions.
By connecting our observations with our performances as observers, Tati re¬
turns us to the real world, as he does again in Parade. He doesn’t pretend, like
Disney or Coppola, to give us anything better. Instead he helps us to become a
better audience by presenting us precisely with our social predicament as spec¬
tators, and then trying to show us how we might become partners in and through
that experience.
Much the same could be said for the event generated by a mainly teenage au¬
dience around showings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in more than two hun¬
dred cities across the United States. (I’m told that the fad has even passed
through Florence, though not, alas, when I was there.) As an amateur of this
curious phenomenon, one who has witnessed only three performances at the 8th
Street Playhouse in New York, I cannot claim to be qualified to discuss the move¬
ment as a whole. But I can’t deny, either, that my three visits were all exhila¬
rating experiences.
Both the film and the stage musical on which the film is based (I first
encountered them while living in London four and five years ago, respectively)
describe the initiation of an ingenuous American couple into the bisexual joys
practiced in a haunted house by English denizens of Grade B horror and science
+ 8
Going to the Movies
fiction films. (The crossovers between England and America are possibly as in¬
tricate here as those between female and male.) A distanced theatrical narrative
that is interrupted repeatedly by a narrator and bracketed by self-conscious film
references, the movie began to be appropriated spontaneously about three years
ago by isolated members of an audience that attended regularly the midnight
screenings of the film in Greenwich Village.
Their appropriation can be seen as an unconscious yet authentic act of film
criticism, one that returns in-the-flesh theatricality and confrontation to a flashy
work that needs them. Some fans fill the pauses in the film’s dialogue with wise¬
cracks, many of them retained from one show to the next and recited in uni¬
son. Other habitues get themselves up, often in drag, to resemble the main
characters and then mimic the onscreen performers’ gestures, standing beneath
the screen and in the aisles, while friends spotlight their actions with flashlight
beams. Props are used; rice is thrown during the wedding sequence, and water
pistols and umbrellas are sometimes brandished to accompany the subsequent
rainstorm. These rituals and others have gradually developed into a richly elab¬
orated, multifaceted “text” in which the film itself is only the ostensible center-
piece; it is not always the precise center of attention.
At a Rocky Horror midnight show about a week ago I met a couple of proud
veterans, each of whom had seen the film nearly three hundred times. Two
women were present to play the Tim Curry part of Dr. Frank N. Furter (the
leading transsexual character, who appears in drag), along with more than a
dozen other performers, many of whom went through several elaborate costume
changes to match their screen counterparts. One of the women playing Frank
was a New York regular who told me she had seen the film fifty times; the other,
a young black woman from Chicago, took over the role for a few guest appear¬
ances toward the end.
Despite some competitive divisions and hierarchies within this cult, the spirit
of the shows I have attended has been markedly democratic and nonelitist. No
one is treated like an outsider; anyone, theoretically, can make her or his own
contribution to the “text,” which is in a state of continual change and refinement.
What is it about these shows that is so energetic and exciting? Above all, I
think it is the experience of a film’s being used by people as a means of com¬
municating with one another—not after the film has ended, but while it is still
in progress. I think we could leam a great deal about our own favorite movies
if we knew how to use them that way.
Some commentators have found the implications of this practice to be fascis-
tic and mindless. The adoption of such a movie (or any movie) as a sacred text
to be memorized, recited as a catechism, or elaborated upon as in a religious
commentary offends their sense of propriety and aesthetics. Without wishing
to idealize this ritual, I would like to point out that it is much more appealing
Larry McMurtry
49
to experience it than to hear or read about it. (As a group activity, the closest
parallels that spring to mind are jam sessions among jazz musicians and re¬
sponses from congregations to sermons at black revival meetings.) With its
characteristic open-mindedness, Newsweek reports that “Some middle-aged view¬
ers are disgusted by the film’s blatant transsexuality; others merely dislike it.”
Still others, less self-defensive, have simply enjoyed the show, recognizing at
once how fundamentally innocent it is. Or perhaps I should say innocently per¬
verse, like the rest of filmgoing.
What most of the objections fail to acknowledge is that the meaning of any
work of art is in part bound up in its social function. The Rocky Horror phenom¬
enon—not, I should stress, the film—is a work of art whose audience and cre¬
ators are essentially one, grouped around a shared irony about sexual roles and
social taboos that remains as a legacy of the sixties, and whose social function is
largely to bring together strangers and open up new channels of communica¬
tion between them. I like it because it resurrects moviegoing as a communal
event, making one proud, not embarrassed, to be sitting next to other people
in the dark.
Lakfiy McMufitfiy
At first I went to the movies to see the movies: the Saturday matinees with Hopalong Cas¬
sidy and the Bowery Boys. Then, with a suddenness so swift I can still remember it, I be¬
came aware ofgirls, and instantly the local movie theaters became transformed from places
where you watched the screen to places where you were acutely, pairfully aware that twelve-
and thirteen-year-old girls were watching it also—not with you but nearby. And these
girls, whom I had known since the first grade, now turned into little clusters of giggles
and intrigue, and every sexual reference in a film, no matter how subtle and nuanced,
caused them to dissolve. At last 1 took a girl to a movie. It was The Bridge over the
River Kwai. 1 had asked her to attend the graduation dance at Thelma Leah Rose’s Dance
Studio, upstairs over the Princess Theater on Main Street in Urbana, Illinois, but I had
the wrong night, and there was no dance, and so we went to the movies instead. Slowly,
with excruciating care, I put my arm around her, until my hand at last rested on her sa-
£o Going to the Movies
cred shoulder, and there it stayed, the arm growing numb, for the next two hours. When
Pauline Kael writes "1 lost it at the movies, ” what she is reflecting is the truth that for
many decades in America, a movie theater was about the only place where teenage boys
and girls could be alone and unsupervised. And from those moments in the dark arose a
whole matrix of eroticism, so that to this day, for all of us, there is always something sexy
about going to the movies. Here Larry McMurtry, in the novel that Peter Bogdanovich
made into the wonderful 1971 film, recalls just such a moment and where it led. The se¬
lections arejrom Chapters 2, 25, and 26.
from The Last Picture Show
Sonny . . . took his week’s wages and walked across the dark courthouse lawn
to the picture show. Jacy’s white Ford convertible was parked out front, where
it always was on Saturday night. The movie that night was called Storm Warning,
and the posterboards held pictures of Doris Day, Ronald Reagan, Steve Cochran,
and Ginger Rogers. It was past 10P.M., and Miss Mosey, who sold tickets, had
already closed the window; Sonny found her in the lobby, cleaning out the pop¬
corn machine. She was a thin little old lady with such bad eyesight and hearing
that she sometimes had to walk halfway down the aisle to tell whether the com¬
edy or the newsreel was on.
“My goodness, Frank oughtn’t to work you so late on weekends,” she said.
“You done missed the comedy so you don’t need to give me but thirty cents.”
Sonny thanked her and bought a package of Doublemint gum before he went
into the show. Very few people ever came to the late feature; there were not
more than twenty in the whole theater. As soon as his eyes adjusted Sonny de¬
termined that Jacy and Duane were still out parking; Charlene Duggs was sit¬
ting about halfway down the aisle with her little sister Marlene. Sonny walked
down the aisle and tapped her on the shoulder, and the two girls scooted over
a seat.
“I decided you had a wreck,” Charlene said, not bothering to whisper. She
smelled like powder and toilet water.
“You two want some chewin’ gum?” Sonny offered, holding out the package.
The girls each instantly took a stick and popped the gum into their mouths al¬
most simultaneously. They never had any gum money themselves and were both
great moochers. Their father, Royce Duggs, ran a dinky little one-man garage
out on the highway; most of his work was done on pickups and tractors, and
money was tight. The girls would not have been able to afford the toilet water
Larry M c Murtry
S'
either, but their mother, Beulah Duggs, had a secret passion for it and bought
it with money that Royce Duggs thought was going for the girls’ school lunches.
The three of them could only get away with using it on Saturday night when
Royce was customarily too drunk to be able to smell.
After the feature had been playing for a few minutes Sonny and Charlene
got up and moved back into one of the corners. It made Sonny nervous to sit
with Charlene and Marlene both. Even though Charlene was a senior and Mar¬
lene just a sophomore, the two looked so much alike that he was afraid he might
accidentally start holding hands with the wrong one. Back in the comer, he held
Charlene’s hand and they smooched a little, but not much. Sonny really wanted
to see the movie, and it was easy for him to hold his passion down. Charlene
had not got all the sweetness out of the stick of Doublemint and didn’t want
to take it out of her mouth just to kiss Sonny, but after a few minutes she
changed her mind, took it out, and stuck it under the arm of her seat. It seemed
to her that Sonny looked a little bit like Steve Cochran, and she began to kiss
him energetically, squirming and pressing herself against his knee. Sonny re¬
turned the kiss, but with somewhat muted interest. He wanted to keep at least
one eye on the screen, so if Ginger Rogers decided to take her clothes off he
wouldn’t miss it. The posters outside indicated she at least got down to her slip
at one point. Besides, Charlene was always getting worked up in picture shows;
at first Sonny had thought her fits of cinematic passion very encouraging, until
he discovered it was practically impossible to get her worked up except in pic¬
ture shows.
The movies were Charlene’s life, as she was fond of saying. She spent most
of her afternoons hanging around the little beauty shop where her mother
worked, reading movie magazines, and she always referred to movie stars by
their first names. Once when an aunt gave her a dollar for her birthday she went
down to the variety store and bought two fifty-cent portraits to sit on her
dresser: one was of June Allyson and the other Van Johnson. Marlene copied
Charlene’s passions as exactly as possible, but when the same aunt gave her a dol¬
lar the variety store’s stock of portraits was low and she had to make do with
Esther Williams and Mickey Rooney. Charlene kidded her mercilessly about the
latter, and took to sleeping with Van Johnson under her pillow because she was
afraid Marlene might mutilate him out of envy.
After a few minutes of squirming alternately against the seat arm and Sonny’s
knee, lost in visions of Steve Cochran, Charlene abruptly relaxed and sat back.
She languidly returned the chewing gum to her mouth, and for a while they
watched the movie in silence. Then she remembered a matter she had been in¬
tending to bring up.
“Guess what?” she said. “We been going steady a year tonight. You should
have got me something for an anniversary present.”
f2 Going to the Movies
Sonny had been contentedly watching Ginger Rogers, waiting for the slip
scene. Charlene’s remark took him by surprise.
“Well, you can have another stick of gum,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got on
»
me.
“Okay, and I’ll take a dollar, too,” Charlene said. “It cost that much for me
and Marlene to come to the show, and I don’t want to pay my own way on my
anniversary.”
Sonny handed her the package of chewing gum, but not the dollar. Normally
he expected to pay Charlene’s way to the show, but he saw no reason at all why
he should spend fifty cents on Marlene. While he was thinking out the ethics of
the matter the exit door opened down to the right of the screen and Duane and
Jacy slipped in, their arms around one another. They came back and sat down
by Sonny and Charlene.
“Hi you all, what are you doin’ back here in the dark?” Jacy whispered gaily.
Her pretty mouth was a little numb from two hours of virtually uninterrupted
kissing. As soon as it seemed polite, she and Duane started kissing again and set¬
tled into an osculatory doze that lasted through the final reel of the movie. Char¬
lene began nervously popping her finger joints, something she did whenever Jacy
came around. Sonny tried to concentrate on the screen, but it was hard. Jacy
and Duane kept right on kissing, even when the movie ended and the lights came
on. They didn’t break their clinch until Billy came down from the balcony with
his broom and began to sweep.
“Sure was a short show,” Jacy said, turning to grin at Sonny. Her nose wrin¬
kled delightfully when she grinned. She shook her head so that her straight
blond hair would hang more smoothly against her neck. Duane’s hair was tou¬
sled, but when Jacy playfully tried to comb it he yawned and shook her off. She
put on fresh lipstick and they all got up and went outside.
Miss Mosey had taken the Storm Warning posters down and was gallantly try¬
ing to tack up the posters for Sunday’s show, which was Francis Goes to the Army.
The wind whipped around the comers of the old building, making the posters
flop. Miss Mosey’s fingers were so cold she could barely hold the tacks, so the
boys helped her finish while the girls shivered on the curb. Marlene was shiv¬
ering on the curb too, waiting for Sonny to drop her off at the Duggses. Duane
walked Jacy to her convertible and kissed her goodnight a time or two, then came
gloomily to the pickup, depressed at the thought of how long it was until Sat¬
urday night came again.
When they had taken Marlene home and dropped Duane at the rooming
house, Sonny and Charlene drove back to town so they could find out what time
it was from the clock in the jewelry store window. As usual, it was almost time
for Charlene to go home.
“Oh, let’s go on to the lake,” she said. “I guess I can be a few minutes late
tonight, since it’s my anniversary.
Larry M c M u r try
Si
“I never saw anything like that Jacy and Duane,” she said. “Kissing in the pic¬
ture show after the lights go on. That’s pretty bad if you ask me. One of these
days Mrs. Farrow’s gonna catch ’em an’ that’ll be the end of that romance.”
Sonny drove onto the city lake without saying anything, but the remark de¬
pressed him. So far as he was concerned Jacy and Duane knew true love and
would surely manage to get married and be happy. What depressed him was that
it had just become clear to him that Charlene really wanted to go with Duane,
just as he himself really wanted to go with Jacy.
As soon as the pickup stopped Charlene moved over against him. “Crack
your window and leave the heater on,” she said. “It’s still too cold in here for
M
me.
Sonny tried to shrug off his depression by beginning the little routine they al¬
ways went through when they parked: first he would kiss Charlene for about
ten minutes; then she would let him take off her brassiere and play with her
breasts; finally, when he tried to move on to other things she would quickly scoot
back across the seat, put the bra back on, and make him take her home. Some¬
times she indulged in an engulfing kiss or two on the doorstep, knowing that
she could fling herself inside the house if a perilously high wave of passion threat¬
ened to sweep over her.
After the proper amount of kissing Sonny deftly unhooked her bra. This was
the signal for Charlene to draw her arms from the sleeves of her sweater and
slip out of the straps. Sonny hung the bra on the rear-view mirror. So long as
the proprieties were observed, Charlene liked being felt; she obligingly slipped
her sweater up around her neck.
“Eeh, your hands are like ice,” she said, sucking in her breath. Despite the
heater the cab was cold enough to make her nipples crinkle. The wind had blown
all the clouds away, but the moon was thin and dim and the choppy lake lay in
darkness. When Sonny moved his hand the little dash-light threw patches of
shadow over Charlene’s stocky torso.
In a few minutes it became apparent that the cab was warming up faster than
either Sonny or Charlene. He idly held one of her breasts in his hand, but it might
have been an apple someone had given him just when he was least hungry.
“Hey,” Charlene said suddenly, noticing. “What’s the matter with you? You
act half asleep.”
Sonny was disconcerted. He was not sure what was wrong. It did not occur
to him that he was bored. After all, he had Charlene’s breast in his hand, and in
Thalia it was generally agreed that the one thing that was never boring was feel¬
ing a girl’s breasts. Grasping for straws, Sonny tried moving his hand downward,
but it soon got entangled in Charlene’s pudgy fingers.
“Quit, quit,” she said, leaning her head back in expectation of a passionate
kiss.
“But this is our anniversary,” Sonny said. “Let’s do something different.”
54
Going to the Movies
Charlene grimly kept his hand at navel level, infuriated that he should think
he really had license to go lower. That was plainly unfair, because he hadn’t even
given her a present. She scooted back toward her side of the cab and snatched
her brassiere off the mirror.
“What are you trying to do, Sonny, get me pregnant?” she asked indignantly.
Sonny was stunned by the thought. “My lord,” he said. “It was just my hand.”
“Yeah, and one thing leads to another,” she complained, struggling to catch
the top hook of her bra. “Momma told me how that old stuff works.”
Sonny reached over and hooked the hook for her, but he was more de¬
pressed than ever. It was obvious to him that it was a disgrace not to be going
with someone prettier than Charlene, or if not prettier, at least someone more
likable. The problem was how to break up with her and get his football jacket
back.
“Well, you needn’t to get mad,” he said finally. “After so long a time I
get tired of doing the same thing, and you do too. You wasn’t no livelier than
M
me.
“That’s because you ain’t good lookin’ enough,” she said coldly. “You
ain’t even got a ducktail. Why should I let you fiddle around and get me preg¬
nant. We’ll have plenty of time for that old stuff when we decide to get en¬
gaged.”
Sonny twirled the knob on his steering wheel and looked out at the cold scud¬
ding water. He kept wanting to say something really nasty to Charlene, but he
restrained himself. Charlene tucked her sweater back into her skirt and combed
angrily at her brownish blond hair. Her mother had given her a permanent the
day before and her hair was as stiff as wire.
“Let’s go home,” she said. “I’m done late anyway. Some anniversary.”
Sonny backed the pickup around and started for the little cluster of yellow
lights that was Thalia. The lake was only a couple of miles out.
“Charlene, if you feel that way I’d just as soon break up,” he said. “I don’t
want to spoil no more anniversaries for you.”
Charlene was surprised, but she recovered quickly. “That’s the way nice
girls get treated in this town,” she said, proud to be a martyr to virtue.
“I knew you wasn’t dependable,” she added, taking the football jacket and
laying it in the seat between them. “Boys that act like you do never are. That
jacket’s got a hole in the pocket, but you needn’t ask me to sew it up. And you
can give me back my pictures. I don’t want you showin’ ’em to a lot of other
boys and tellin’ them how hot I am.”
Sonny stopped the pickup in front of her house and fished in his billfold for
the three or four snapshots Charlene had given him. One of them, taken at a
swimming pool in Wichita Falls, had been taken the summer before. Charlene
was in a bathing suit. When she gave Sonny the picture she had taken a ballpoint
Larry McMurtry
pen and written on the back of the snapshot, “Look What Legs,” hoping he would
show it to Duane. The photograph showed clearly that her legs were short and
fat, but in spite of it she managed to think of herself as possessing gazellelike slim¬
ness. Sonny laid the pictures on top of the football jacket, and Charlene scooped
them up.
“Well, good-night,” Sonny said. “I ain’t got no hard feelings if you don’t.”
Charlene got out, but then she bethought herself of something and held the
pickup door open a moment. “Don’t you try to go with Marlene,” she said. “Mar¬
lene’s young, and she’s a good Christian girl. If you try to go with her I’ll tell
my Daddy what a wolf you was with me and he’ll stomp the you-know-what
out of you.”
“You was pretty glad to let me do what little I did,” Sonny said, angered. “You
just mind your own business and let Marlene mind hers.”
Charlene gave him a last ill-tempered look. “If you’ve given me one of those
diseases you’ll be sorry,” she said.
She could cheerfully have stabbed Sonny with an ice pick, but instead, to im¬
press Marlene, she went in the house, woke her up, and cried for half the night
about her blighted romance. She told Marlene Sonny had forced her to fondle
him indecently.
“What in the world did it look like?” Marlene asked, bug-eyed with startled
envy.
“Oh, the awfulest thing you ever saw,” Charlene assured her, smearing a thick
coating of beauty cream on her face. “Ouuee, he was nasty. I hope you don’t
ever get involved with a man like that, honey—they make you old before your
time. I bet I’ve aged a year, just tonight.”
Later, when the lights were out, Marlene tried to figure on her fingers what
month it would be when Charlene would be sent away in disgrace to Kizer,
Arkansas to have her baby. They had an aunt who lived in Kizer. Marlene was
not exactly clear in her mind about how one went about getting pregnant, but
she assumed that with such goings on Charlene must have. It was conceivable
that her mother would make Charlene leave the picture of Van Johnson behind
when she was sent away, and that thought cheered Marlene very much. In any
case, it would be nice to have the bedroom to herself.
A week before the picture show closed down Duane came home from boot
camp. He drove in on Sunday morning and word soon got around that he was
leaving for Korea in a week’s time. Sonny learned that he was home Sunday
night, when he and Billy were having a cheeseburger in the cafe.
“Wonder where he is?” he asked. “He hasn’t been to the poolhall.”
“I kinda doubt he’ll come,” Genevieve said, frowning. “His conscience is hurt-
Going to the Movies
ing him too much about your eye. I think he’s gonna stay at the rooming house
this week.”
“Well, maybe he’ll come in,” Sonny said. “There ain’t much to do in this town.
I couldn’t live in it a week without going to the poolhall, I know that.”
“I think it’s all silly,” Genevieve said. “Why don’t you go see him? Be a shame
if he goes to Korea without you all seein’ one another.”
Sonny thought so too, but he was nervous about going to see Duane. He kept
hoping Duane would show up at the poolhall and save him having to make a de¬
cision; but Duane didn’t. So far as anyone knew, he spent the whole week
watching television at his mother’s house. A couple of boys saw him out wash¬
ing his Mercury one afternoon, but he never came to town.
As the week went by, Sonny got more and more nervous. Several times he
was on the verge of picking up the phone and calling—once he did pick it up,
but his nerve failed him and he put it back down. If Duane didn't want to be
bothered there was no point in bothering.
Friday night there was a football game in Henrietta, but Sonny didn't go. He
heard the next morning that Duane had been there drunk. All day he consid¬
ered the problem and finally decided that he would go see Duane at the room¬
ing house and let the chips fall where they may—it couldn’t hurt much to try.
If Duane didn’t want to see him all he had to do was say so.
About five-thirty, as it was beginning to grow dark, Sonny got in the pickup
and drove to the rooming house. Duane’s red Mercury was parked out front.
A norther had struck that afternoon and sheets of cold air rushed through the
town, shaking the leafless mesquite and rattling the dry stems of Old Lady Mal¬
one’s flowers. Sonny rang the doorbell and then stuffed his hands in his pock¬
ets to keep them warm.
“H’lo, Mrs. Malone,” he said, when the old lady opened the inside door. The
screen door was latched, as always. “Duane here?”
“That’s his car, ain’t it?” she said, edging behind the door so the wind
wouldn’t hit anything but her nose and her forehead. “He’s here if he ain’t
walked off.”
She shut the door and went to get Duane. Sonny shuffled nervously on the
porch. In a minute, Duane opened the door and stepped outside.
“Hi,” Sonny said, finding it hard to get his breath because of the wind.
“Thought I’d better come by and see you before you got off.”
“Glad you did,” Duane said. He was nervous, but he did look sort of glad.
He was wearing Levi’s and a western shirt.
“Want to go eat a bite?” Sonny suggested.
“Yeah, let me get my jacket.”
He got his football jacket, the one from the year when the two of them had
been cocaptains, they got in the warm pickup, and drove to the cafe. Conver-
Larry McMurtry
J7
sation was slow in coming until Sonny thought to ask about the army, but then
Duane loosened up and told one army story after another while they ate their
hamburger steaks. It was pretty much like old times. Penny waited on them—
she had had twin girls during the winter, put on twenty-five pounds, and was
experimenting that night with purple lipstick. Old Marston had died in Febru¬
ary of pneumonia—he had gone to sleep in a bar ditch in the wrong season.
Genevieve had hired a friendly young widow woman to do the cooking.
“Guess we ought to take in the picture show,” Sonny said. “Tonight’s the last
night.”
“A good thing, too,” Penny said, overhearing him. “Picture shows been get-
tin’ more sinful all the time, if you ask me. Them movie stars lettin’ their tit¬
ties hang out—I never seen the like. The last time I went I told my old man he
could just take me home, I wasn’t sittin’ still for that kind of goings on.”
“Yeah, we might as well go,” Duane said, ignoring her. “Hate to miss the last
night.”
They went to the poolhall and Sonny got his football jacket too. Then they
angled across the square to the picture show and bought their tickets. A few
grade-school kids were going in. The picture was an Audie Murphy movie called
The Kid from Texas, with Gale Storm.
“Why hello, Duane,” Miss Mosey said. “I thought you was done overseas.
Hope you all like the show.”
The boys planned to, but somehow the occasion just didn’t work out. Audie
Murphy was a scrapper as usual, but it didn’t help. It would have taken Win¬
chester ’73 or Red River or some big movie like that to have crowded out the mem¬
ories the boys kept having. They had been at the picture show so often with Jacy
that it was hard to keep from thinking of her, lithely stretching herself in the
back row after an hour of kissing and cuddling. Such thoughts were dangerous
to both of them.
“Hell, this here’s a dog,” Duane said.
Sonny agreed. “Why don’t we run down to Fort Worth, drink a little beer?”
he asked.
“My bus leaves at six-thirty in the mornin’,” Duane said. “Reckon we could
make it to Fort Worth and back by six-thirty?”
“Easy.”
Miss Mosey was distressed to see them leaving so soon. She tried to give them
their money back, but they wouldn’t take it. She was scraping out the popcorn
machine, almost in tears. “If Sam had lived, I believe we could have kept it goin’,”
she said, “but me and Jimmy just didn’t have the know-how. Duane, you watch
out now, overseas.” Outside the wind was so cold it made their eyes water.
j8 Going to the Movies
Of all the people in Thalia, Billy missed the picture show most. He couldn’t un¬
derstand that it was permanently closed. Every night he kept thinking it would
open again. For seven years he had gone to the show every single night, always
sitting in the balcony, always sweeping out once the show was over; he just
couldn’t stop expecting it. Every night he took his broom and went over to the
picture show, hoping it would be open. When it wasn’t, he sat on the curb in
front of the courthouse, watching the theater, hoping it would open a little later;
then, after a while, in puzzlement, he would sweep listlessly off down the high¬
way toward Wichita Falls. Sonny watched him as closely as he could, but it still
worried him. He was afraid Billy might get through a fence or over a cattleguard
and sweep right off into the mesquite. He might sweep away down the creeks
and gullies and never be found.
Once, on a Friday afternoon, Miss Mosey had to go into the theater to get
something she had left and she let Billy in for a minute. The screen was disap¬
pointingly dead, but Billy figured that at least he was in, so he went up into the
balcony and sat waiting. Miss Mosey thought he had gone back outside and
locked him in. It was not until late that night, when Sonny got worried and began
asking around, that Miss Mosey thought of the balcony. When they got there,
Billy was sitting quietly in the dark with his broom, waiting, perfectly sure that
the show would come on sometime.
All through October, then through November, Billy missed the show. Sonny
didn’t know what to do about it, but it was a bad time in general and he didn’t
know what to do about himself either. He had taken another lease to pump. He
wanted to work harder and tire himself out, so he wouldn’t have to lie awake
at night and feel alone. Nothing much was happening, and he didn’t think much
was going to. One day he went to Wichita and bought a television set, thinking
it might help Billy, but it didn’t at all. Billy would watch it as long as Sonny was
around, but the minute Sonny left he left too. He didn’t trust the television. He
kept going over to the picture show night after night, norther or no norther—
he sat on the sidewalk and waited, cold and puzzled. He knew it would open
sooner or later, and Sonny could think of no way to make him understand that
it wouldn’t.
One cold, sandstormy morning in late November Sonny woke up early and
went downstairs to light the poolhall fires. Billy was not around, but that was
not unusual. Sonny sneezed two or three times, the air was so dry. One of the
gas stoves was old and he had to blow on it to get all the burners to light. While
he was blowing on the burners he heard a big cattle truck roar past the poolhall,
coming in from the south. Suddenly there was a loud shriek, as the driver hit
the brakes for all he was worth—the stoplight was always turning red at the
wrong time and catching trucks that thought they had it made.
Sonny went back upstairs and dressed to go eat breakfast. He couldn’t find
Larry McMurtry j9
either one of his eye patches and supposed Billy must have them. It was the kind
of morning when a welding helmet would have been a nice sort of thing to wear.
The sky was cloudy and gritty, and the wind tfut. When he stepped outside Sonny
noticed that the big cattle truck was stopped by the square, with a little knot of
men gathered around it. The doctor’s car had just pulled up to the knot of men
and the old doctor got out, his hair uncombed, his pajamas showing under his
bathrobe. Someone had been run over. Sonny started to turn away, but then he
saw Billy’s broom laying in the street. By the time he got to the men the doc¬
tor had returned to his car and was driving away.
Billy was lying face up on the street, near the curb. For some reason he had
put both eye patches on—his eyes were completely covered. There were just
four or five men there—the sheriff and his deputy, a couple of men from the
filling stations, one cowboy, and a pumper who was going out early. They were
not paying attention to Billy, but were trying to keep the truck driver from feel¬
ing bad. He was a big, square-faced man from Waurika, Oklahoma, who didn’t
look like he felt too bad. The truck was loaded with Hereford yearlings and they
were bumping one another around and shitting, the bright green cowshit drip¬
ping off the sideboards and splatting onto the street.
“This sand was blowin’,” the trucker said. His name was Hurley. “I never no¬
ticed him, never figured nobody would be in the street. Why he had them damn
blinders on his eyes, he couldn’t even see. What was he doin’ out there any¬
way, carry in’ that broom?”
“Aw, nothing’, Hurley,” the sheriff said. “He was just an ol’ simpleminded
kid, sort of retarded—never had no sense. Wasn’t your fault, I can see that. He
was just there—he wasn’t doin’ nothing.”
Sonny couldn’t stand the way the men looked at the truck driver and had al¬
ready forgotten Billy.
“He was sweeping, you sons of bitches!” he yelled suddenly, surprising the
men and himself. They all looked at him as if he were crazy, and indeed, he didn’t
know himself why he had yelled. He walked over on the courthouse lawn, not
knowing what to do. In a minute he bent over and vomited by one of the dusty,
stunted little cedar trees that the Amity club had planted. His father had come
by that time.
“Son, it’s a bad blow,” he said. “You let me take care of things, okay? You
don’t want to be bothered with any funeral-home stuff, do you?”
Sonny didn’t; he was glad to let his father take care of it. He walked out in
the street and got Billy’s broom and took it over to him.
“Reckon I better go try to sell a little gas,” one of the filling-station men said.
“Look’s like this here’s about wound up.”
Sonny didn’t want to yell at the men again, but he couldn’t stand to walk away
and leave Billy there by the truck, with the circle of men spitting and farting and
6o
Going to the Movies
shuffling all around him. Before any of them knew what he was up to he got Billy
under the arms and started off with him, dragging him and trying to run. The
men were so amazed they didn’t even try to stop him. The heels of Billy’s bro-
gans scraped on the pavement, but Sonny kept on, dragged him across the windy
street to the curb in front of the picture show. That was as far as he went. He
laid Billy on the sidewalk where at least he would be out of the street, and cov¬
ered him with his Levi jacket. He just left the eye patches on.
The men slowly came over. They looked at Sonny as if he were someone very
strange. Hurley and the sheriff came together and stood back a little way from
the crowd.
“You all got some crazy kids in this town,” Hurley said, spitting his tobacco
juice carefully down wind.
Geoffrey O’Brien
What O’Brien remembers here is something I had almost forgotten: how, when you are
young, the savor of a movie title itself suggests exciting and forbidden worlds. For weeks
before 1 saw The Blackboard Jungle, the title obsessed me. And every Sunday in church,
I turned to the page if Our Sunday Visitor on which a critic named Dale Francis sniffed
at the latest immorality from Hollywood. Beneath his column was the list of the Legion
of Decency ratings, and under “C (for Condemned)’’ 1 read eagerly about One Summer
with Monica, The Naked Night, and The Moon Is Blue. Such innocent words to in¬
spire inflamed fantasies!
from The Phantom Empire
The kids in the neighborhood had seen many movies by now, and had even
learned almost all there was to know about endangered caravans, men half-mad
with thirst, eyes peering through underbrush, alligators breaking the surfaces of
Geoff r e y O’Brien
6 i
rivers, lost explorers starting at the rumble of distant drums, burning arrows
flying over the walls of stockades, cavalry troops riding into canyons.
Once the model had been established they could find movies everywhere.
Only a slight variation in intensity distinguished the real movies on the screen
from the numberless movielike artifacts and experiences: the expedition through
the crazy house at the seashore park, the skeletons of dinosaurs rearing up in the
natural history museum, the comic-book adventures of ghosts and ducks and
Stone Age hunters, the episodes of drama or history isolated on bubble-gum
cards, the three-dimensional plays staged with metal-and-rubber figurines, the
movie stars proffering cigarettes or facial cream in the pages of Look and The Sat¬
urday Evening Post, the fragmentary violence of the drugstore book covers with
their brawling mobsters and strangled blondes. In yard and playground and
parking lot the children enacted poses copied from production stills.
Through the bush telegraph of the electric world the children got word of
the movies that were coming. Some hadn’t even been filmed yet. Some had
opened in a far-off city and had not yet come to town, or might never come;
and some they might in any event be forbidden to see. Advance messages ar¬
rived in comic-book versions, in paperbacks of the novels the movies were
based on, in lobby posters glimpsed as they exited from the matinee showing of
The African Lion or The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold.
From the posters and the newspaper ads they learned many phrases: “Frank
and revealing!” “Shattering power!” “The emotional experience of a lifetime!”
“All the human depth and electrifying drama ofthe tremendous best-seller!” The
concepts were still vague: they did not yet, for instance, know precisely what
“human depth” meant. It suggested an intimate but still foreign space, a network
of hallways inside an adult body.
They were haunted by the titles of all the movies they had missed. Each title
stood for a story that might have been different from all the other stories, if only
they could have experienced it. Each was a door, and there were thousands of
doors they had not entered. They imagined themselves in the dark watching
whatever such a title might denote, a place with different-colored vegetation,
exotic legal codes, novel varieties of emotion and behavior. There was no telling
how deep the space concealed by the name might be. Each was like a planet hid¬
den under cloud cover.
Itmightbe simply a name: Rebecca or Diane, Hondo or Jubal, Moonjleet or Drag-
onwyck. Was it the name of a woman, a house, a ship, a dynasty, a treasure, a
crime? And why would any one name be so overwhelmingly powerful that a
movie had be named after it?
It might be plainly in another language, a sound of imminent unknown dan¬
ger: Odongo, Jivaro, Mogamho, Simba, Hukl, Bwana Devil, Macumha Love. It might
simply specify the place where the strange erupted into the real— Istanbul,
62
Going to the Movies
Malaya, Tanganyika, Timbuktu, Beyond Mombasa, East of Sumatra —or add some no¬
tation of the action that took place there: Flight to Hong Kong, Flight to Tangier,
Escape to Burma, Storm over the Nile.
It might suggest a world of infinite choreographic frivolity, where adults
wore bright clothes and laughed wildly, a drunkenly exuberant picnic: You Can’t
Run Away from It, It Happens Every Spring, Everybody Does It, The More the Merrier,
It Should Happen to You, It Happened to Jane, It Had to Happen, It started with a Kiss,
You’re Never Too Young, It’s Never Too Late.
It might assume a riddling form. It referred to an event but provided no clues
to its real nature. The Man Who Died Twice. How? The Woman They Almost Lynched.
Why? The Ship That Died of Shame. Why? How? It spoke of fantastic and cata¬
strophic events in the past tense, as if they had already occurred: It Came from
Outer Space, It Conquered the World, From Hell It Came, The Day the World Ended,
The Day the Sky Exploded, The Night the World Exploded. What? When?
It might, by contrast, conjure up an outpouring of vast cyclonic emotion, a
potentially annihilating tumult urged on by violin ensembles: All This and Heaven
Too, All That Heaven Allows, Now and Forever, Goodbye Again, Never Say Goodbye,
Heaven Can Wait, There’s Always Tomorrow, Tomorrow Is Forever. Time was to be
overwhelmed by feeling. How would anyone make a photograph of that?
Those domains of large feeling were inhabited by companies of equally enor¬
mous humans, who could be defined only by broad sweeps of adjectives: The
Proud and Profane, The Bold and the Brave, The Tall Men, The Violent Men, The High
and the Mighty. What would such people look like? What kind of heightened lan¬
guage and monumental gestures would that race of giants use?
Emotion could be tuned to an even shriller, more ominous pitch: Too Much,
Too Soon, They Dare Not Love, To the Ends of the Earth, None Shall Escape, The Damned
Don’t Cry, No Way Out. It was something that somebody might scrawl on a win¬
dow or a wall in a moment of ultimate panic.
It sketched an emotional landscape of conflagration— Fofire, Fire Down Below,
Flame of the Islands —or meteorological upheaval— Written on the Wind, Blowing
Wild, Wild Is the Wind, Storm Fear, Storm Warning —or simply promised to strip
the world bare: Naked Alibi, Naked Earth, The Naked Edge, The Naked Dawn, The
Naked Street, The Naked Hills, The NakedJungle.
It was a voice, perhaps, trying (against a background noise of breaking glass,
someone having just hurled a bottle at a mirror) to scream out a confession: I’ll
Cry Tomorrow, 1 Died a Thousand Times, 1 Want to Live!
A good title was something to be recited again and again, an empowering
chant. The strongest evoked the worst that could befall and warded it off through
the sheer power of their syllabic configuration— Bad Day at Black Rock, Pickup on
South Street, Stakeout on Dope Street —or through an arcane sort of number magic:
Riot in Cell Block 11, Seven MenfromN ow,Five against the House, Ten Seconds to Hell,
One Minute to Zero.
Geoff r ey O’Brien
63
The most endlessly mysterious were those that packed into a single word a
world of undefined possibilities— Illicit, Notorious, Ruthless, Shockproof, Danger¬
ous, Caught, Caged, Cornered, Branded, Desperate, Forbidden —as if the fullness of a
life could be represented by one undifferentiated sign.
Those children occasionally wondered—looking across at the marquee and
noticing how it filled the street and put a label on it, how it turned the street
into a frame around a name—what would be the right name for the movie to
be made of their lives.
To be made into a movie was salvation, because the picture could not die: it was
life itself. The saturated hues of Technicolor constituted all by themselves a trop¬
ical garden, a warm bath at the end of the mind. It required only swimming-
pool logic to wade out into the sarongs and geometries of South Seas movies and
Esther Williams vehicles, Pagan Love Song and Pearl of the South Pacific, the gaudy
recurrent dance parties of heathens and pirates and jungle princesses.
There was another aspect to this extended game of dress-up: it was called
history. In that enchanted world, John Wayne conquered Central Asia (while
making eyes at Debra Paget), Jack Hawkins built the pyramids (while having
troubles with Joan Collins), Gary Cooper spoke Seminole (while flirting some¬
what coyly with Mari Aldon), and (in Yankee Pasha ) the American adventurer
(Jeff Chandler) seeking to rescue, his fiancee (Rhonda Fleming) from Barbary pi¬
rates stumbled into a Vegas-style harem populated by the Miss Universe final¬
ists of 1952 and presided over by Lee J. Cobb.
Across the screen’s shimmering surface floated a circus of elements—gauze
and feathers, chain mail and drawbridges, Arabs and Indians, forests, pools,
fires—among which the eye moved like a swimmer. They appeared, they shifted,
they reassembled in different shapes and colors. At every instant they gratified.
An arcane vocabulary categorized varieties of pleasure: CinemaScope, Techni¬
color, Eastmancolor, Trucolor, Cinerama.
The cowboy movies in particular existed to give prominence to certain
colors: blue sky, green fir, ocher rockface, a Crayola landscape. In The
Naked Spur or The Man from Laramie the spectator’s function was to appreciate
the solidity of the landscape and the force and velocity with which the actors
moved through it. Some ultimate reassurance about the thereness of things was
implicit in the arroyos and salt flats of the desolate territories where grizzled old
scouts—Arthur Hunnicutt, Walter Brennan, Millard Mitchell—cooked bacon
and read signs. At the end the producers expressed their gratitude to Montana
or Utah for existing. But where had there ever been such places outside of a
movie?
Technicolor made scant distinction between the actual lakes and mountains
of the westerns and the man-made costumes and furnishings appropriate to
64 Going to the Movies
Knights of the Round Table or The Band Wagon. It was all equally and ravishingly
unreal. The lens converted even sky and sea into artificial constructions. The air
was different in those bright outdoor scenes that could be observed only in a
darkened interior: it was sustenance.
The deep hunger that it fed defined itself most vividly through trappings, friv¬
olities, backdrops. Bric-a-brac was essence. The ribbons and packaging were busy
enough in themselves that you barely needed to follow the plot or notice the
new faces of 1957: Taina Elg, Diane Varsi, Miyoshi Umeki, Russ Tamblyn, John
Gavin. The actors were there to provide a support system for the props and cos¬
tumes, to give the camera something to encircle or swoop down on.
The screen was a second sky, where what you saw was nothing compared to
the anticipation of what you might at any moment witness: a shooting star, a
spaceship, an apocalypse. Going to the movies involved, always, a religious
sense of hope. An incipient sense of worshipful attention was ready for the
unimagined, the barely imaginable, God or world war or Martians. You wanted
visible proof.
In Sunday school, reference was made repeatedly to certain uncanny and world¬
shaping events, but that was hearsay. Church amounted to little more than an
anteroom to actual experience, a place where things were spoken of at a dis¬
tance. Listening to Bible stories was at best like listening to tantalizing synopses
of forthcoming releases. It wasn’t quite enough, any more than leafing through
back issues of Photoplay was enough. The thirst was to see the truth, to be over¬
whelmed by it.
That was what movie theaters were for: they were the places where some¬
thing real was going on, where plagues and floods really happened. A verbal ac¬
count of the Red Sea parting or the Angel of Death gliding over the rooftops of
Egypt couldn’t compare to witnessing it in The Ten Commandments. It couldn’t
even compare to the trailer for The Ten Commandments. Why settle for words
when you could go see photographs of God? And if He couldn’t quite (consid¬
ering the buildup) measure up—if the burning bush was, after all, not sufficiently
different from the brushfires of Flaming Feather and The Flame and the Arrow and
Fire over Africa, and if (to one’s secret disappointment) they didn’t even show
God—that was surely not the fault of the movies.
God was not interesting if He only occurred in the remote past and was in¬
capable of being played by a movie star. If the most important thing in the world
was invisible, how important could it be? It was fitting that there should be a
movie of God, a movie that would live up to what the promotional kit for The
Big Fisherman promised: “the stirring physical action, the massive spectacle, and
the exalted spiritual theme.” He belonged in that atmosphere, and would ulti-
Geoiff t ey O’Brien
mately be judged by its standards, in the same way it was said of certain famous
stage actors that they just couldn’t make it in the movies.
It was when your world blacked out and the other radiant world imposed it¬
self that you understood the word “awe.” The kingdom of heaven consisted of
robed Saracens, half-naked princesses, ululating high priests, dust-covered
troupes of elephants and camels, earthquakes and cobras, thousands of bits of
metal clanking in unison, an ensemble sustained by the rumbling of a gigantic
orchestra. It was the authentic noise and texture of an ancient alien planet.
Wasn’t this like the effect of prayer, to have such things realized? To be en¬
abled to see those hosts of armed warriors assembled? To travel those enormous
distances—soaring into the air and crossing over plains and mountains—and in
the midst of it to hear the voice of God in all its thunderous sonority? The voice
alone would not have meant so much. The manifold glory lay not in the voice
but in the thousands of extras and horses and terraced palaces assembled at its
command.
Whereas the empty church was just empty. You and your friends crept in one
afternoon as if expecting to find God relaxing at home. There was nothing. That
is, there was nothing playing there. Some awkward posters of Jesus at table, by
a lake, on a hill, patting children on the head, smiling at lepers: coming attrac¬
tions. But those illustrations were drained images, not remotely as gritty or tur¬
bulent as the lobby cards for Demetrius and the Gladiators or The Big Fisherman. If
God was anywhere He was across town working wide-screen miracles.
Not that all the movies had His stamp on them. It was a gradual education to
scout the borders of the diabolical territories in which scenes, subplots, and
whole movies might be located. There was a curse on some movies, so that
you could never undo the fact of having seen them. The loop would run again
and again. You enter the steamy little movie theater in the tropical port and
find a movie about a steamy little tropical port. The white men, in white jack¬
ets, penetrate a clearing. They have to bend their heads to get into the hut.
There is a fire on the screen. Voodoo drums. Piles of skulls. An amulet made
of twisted roots. The dancers move in a circle. The eyes move toward the cen¬
ter of the screen where the center of the ritual is happening. Ceremonial cooch
dance.
Americans break a taboo and are cursed. Having violated the sanctuary of the
cobra goddess, they will each be seduced in turn by the beautiful woman (Faith
Domergue) who deep down is cobra. The bedroom scenes elide into slithers and
hisses. “You ready for me, baby?” Scream and darkness. It’s never what is shown,
it’s what is about to be shown: the threatening music, the camera inching to¬
ward the unspeakable. But in the end you remember best the act of entering the
66
Going to the Movies
theater, as if the theater were itself the forbidden tropical clearing given over
to the power of cobras and skulls and amulets.
It was the source of the talk. You talked your way out of what the images had
made you feel. Limit their power by tagging them—or get rid of the curse by
passing it on to someone else. For every frightening and forbidden image you
had seen, there were thousands more of which you had only heard. A daily sem¬
inar filled in the blanks. From the beginning movies were incorporated indis¬
solubly into a system of orally transmitted folklore.
Older brothers came home late from the movies and could be overheard talk¬
ing on the phone, or sitting up late in the kitchen telling what happened in the
last reel of Try and Get Me —how the lynch mob set the jail on fire, how the ter¬
ror was visible on the face of the trapped kidnapper as they lifted him from his
cell and passed him like a doll over the heads of the crowd—or how Gene Krupa
was a junkie—or how Kim Novak saw a black-robed nun emerge from the dark¬
ness and was so surprised she fell backward off the belltower to her death—or
how the aliens in The Mysterians abducted earth women to mate with them and
repopulate their dying planet.
Retelling a movie was an art in itself. Children grew up telling each other
plots. There would be sessions where the most frightening or disgusting episodes
would be elicited from a circle of people. “The sickest thing I ever saw was when
the giant ants invaded the communications room on board the ship in Them! and
wrapped their pincers around the sailors’ bodies.” “The worst thing was the mark
the aliens made on people’s necks in Invaders from Mars.” “They staked him out
in the desert and coated him with honey and let the ants devour him.” “The mask
had nails inside it.” “The man sent her a pair of binoculars that poked her eyes
out.” You didn’t have to have seen it, hearing about it was bad enough. Years
were spent trying to define the precise point where pleasure became disturbance,
the border between too upsetting and not upsetting enough.
The folklore had to do with aliens in sunglasses who drank blood and whose
language had to be translated by subtitles, baby monsters spawned by radiation,
husbands who devised clever methods of murdering their wives or driving them
insane and detectives who laid equally clever traps to catch them, exotic tor¬
tures practiced by Apaches and medieval warlords, children abducted by desert
marauders, bombing raids in the big war against Germany and Japan and Rus¬
sia and Korea, madmen whose urge to kill was unleashed by particular melodies
or colors, people haunted by dreams that told them they had lived another life
before this one, archaic chants that brought mummies to life. Stories of mira¬
cles, all of them, like Lazarus clambering groggily from his tomb in the stiffly
uncoordinated manner of a resurrected Boris Karloff.
The real miracle was simply that those creatures lived and moved. Once set
in motion, the legions of walking ghosts never stopped. The thousands of cel-
67
G e offr e y O'Brien
luloid beings who inhabited movies were like windup toys that would run for
eternity, or like the proliferating animate mops unwittingly activated by the sor¬
cerer’s apprentice in Fantasia, or like the irradiated insects who in Them! and
Tarantula and The Deadly Mantis seemed on the verge of sweeping over the
earth’s surface. At night, in the dark, the disembodied creatures swarmed in the
mind, indestructible.
Movie Stabs
H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken meets Rudolph Valentino (1895—1926) shortly before the actor’s final
illness and is startled to find what he least expected: a gentleman, recoiling at "the whole
grotesque futility of his life." Mencken (1880—1956) was not known as a show business
writer; politics, philosophy, and human nature were his subjects. Yet here he produces a
poignant examination of celebrity and sees Valentino with eyes not blinded by his stardom.
Rudolph Valentino
By one of the chances that relieve the dullness of life and make it instructive, I
had the honor of dining with this celebrated gentleman in New York, a week or
so before his fatal illness. I had never met him before, nor seen him on the screen;
the meeting was at his instance, and, when it was proposed, vaguely puzzled me.
But soon its purpose became clear enough. Valentino was in trouble and wanted
advice. More, he wanted advice from an elder and disinterested man, wholly
removed from the movies and all their works. Something that I had written,
falling under his eye, had given him the notion that I was a judicious fellow. So
he requested one of his colleagues, a lady of the films, to ask me to dinner at her
hotel.
The night being infernally warm, we stripped off our coats, and came to terms
at once. I recall that he wore suspenders of extraordinary width and thickness.
On so slim a young man they seemed somehow absurd, especially on a hot Sum¬
mer night. We perspired horribly for an hour, mopping our faces with our
handkerchiefs, the table napkins, the comers of the tablecloth, and a couple of
towels brought in by the humane waiter. Then there came a thunderstorm, and
we began to breathe. The hostess, a woman as tactful as she is charming, disap¬
peared mysteriously and left us to commune.
The trouble that was agitating Valentino turned out to be very simple. The
71
71
Movie Stars
ribald New York papers were full of it, and that was what was agitating him.
Some time before, out in Chicago, a wandering reporter had discovered, in the
men’s wash-room of a gaudy hotel, a slot-machine selling talcum-powder.
That, of course, was not unusual, but the color of the talcum-powder was. It
was pink. The news made the town giggle for a day, and inspired an editorial
writer on the Chicago Tribune to compose a hot weather editorial. In it he
protested humorously against the effeminization of the American man, and laid
it lightheartedly to the influence of Valentino and his sheik movies. Well, it so
happened that Valentino, passing through Chicago that day on his way east
from the Coast, ran full tilt into the editorial, and into a gang of reporters who
wanted to know what he had to say about it. What he had to say was full of fire.
Throwing off his i oo% Americanism and reverting to the mores of his father-
land, he challenged the editorial writer to a duel, and, when no answer came,
to a fist fight. His masculine honor, it appeared, had been outraged. To the hint
that he was less than he, even to the extent of one half of one per cent, there
could be no answer save a bath of blood.
Unluckily, all this took place in the United States, where the word honor,
save when it is applied to the structural integrity of women, has only a comic
significance. When one hears of the honor of politicians, of bankers, of lawyers,
of the United States itself, everyone naturally laughs. So New York laughed at
Valentino. More, it ascribed his high dudgeon to mere publicity-seeking: he
seemed a vulgar movie ham seeking space. The poor fellow, thus doubly beset,
rose to dudgeons higher still. His Italian mind was simply unequal to the situa¬
tion. So he sought counsel from the neutral, aloof and seasoned. Unluckily, I
could only name the disease, and confess frankly that there was no remedy—
none, that is, known to any therapeutics within my ken. He should have passed
over the gibe of the Chicago journalist, I suggested, with a lofty snort—perhaps,
better still, with a counter gibe. He should have kept away from the reporters
in New York. But now, alas, the mischief was done. He was both insulted and
ridiculous, but there was nothing to do about it. I advised him to let the dread¬
ful farce roll along to exhaustion. He protested that it was infamous. Infamous?
Nothing, I argued, is infamous that is not true. A man still has his inner integrity.
Can he still look into the shaving-glass of a morning? Then he is still on his two
legs in this world, and ready even for the Devil. We sweated a great deal, dis¬
cussing these lofty matters. We seemed to get nowhere.
Suddenly it dawned upon me—I was too dull or it was too hot for me to see
it sooner—that what we were talking about was really not what we were talk¬
ing about at all. I began to observe Valentino more closely. A curiously naive
and boyish young fellow, certainly not much beyond thirty, and with a disarm¬
ing air of inexperience. To my eye, at least, not handsome, but nevertheless
rather attractive. There was some obvious fineness in him; even his clothes
H. L . Mencken
73
were not precisely those of his horrible trade. He began talking of his home, his
people, his early youth. His words were simple and yet somehow very eloquent.
I could still see the mime before me, but now and then, briefly and darkly, there
was a flash of something else. That something else, I concluded, was what is com¬
monly called, for want of a better name, a gentleman. In brief, Valentino’s agony
was the agony of a man of relatively civilized feelings thrown into a situation of
intolerable vulgarity, destructive alike to his peace and to his dignity—nay, into
a whole series of such situations.
It was not that trifling Chicago episode that was riding him; it was the whole
grotesque futility of his life. Had he achieved, out of nothing, a vast and dizzy
success? Then that success was hollow as well as vast—a colossal and prepos¬
terous nothing. Was he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time the
multitudes yelled he felt himself blushing inside. The old story of Diego Valdez
once more, but with a new poignancy in it. Valdez, at all events, was High Ad¬
miral of Spain. But Valentino, with his touch of fineness in him—he had his com¬
monness, too, but there was that touch of fineness—Valentino was only the hero
of the rabble. Imbeciles surrounded him in a dense herd. He was pursued by
women—but what women! (Consider the sordid comedy of his two mar¬
riages—the brummagem, star-spangled passion that invaded his very deathbed!)
The thing, at the start, must have only bewildered him. But in those last days,
unless I am a worse psychologist than even the professors of psychology, it was
revolting him. Worse, it was making him afraid.
I incline to think that the inscrutable gods, in taking him off so soon and at a
moment of fiery revolt, were very kind to him. Living, he would have tried in¬
evitably to change his fame—if such it is to be called—into something closer to
his heart’s desire. That is to say, he would have gone the way of many another
actor—the way of increasing pretension, of solemn artiness, of hollow hocus-
pocus, deceptive only to himself. I believe he would have failed, for there was
little sign of the genuine artist in him. He was essentially a highly respectable
young man, which is the sort that never metamorphoses into an artist. But sup¬
pose he had succeeded? Then his tragedy, I believe, would have only become
the more acrid and intolerable. For he would have discovered, after vast heav-
ings and yearnings, that what he had come to was indistinguishable from what
he had left. Was the fame of Beethoven any more caressing and splendid than
the fame of Valentino? To you and me, of course, the question seems to answer
itself. But what of Beethoven? He was heard upon the subject, viva voce, while
he lived, and his answer survives, in all the freshness of its profane eloquence,
in his music. Beethoven, too, knew what it meant to be applauded. Walking with
Goethe, he heard something that was not unlike the murmur that reached
Valentino through his hospital window. Beethoven walked away briskly.
Valentino turned his face to the wall.
74
Movie Stars
Here was a young man who was living daily the dream of millions of other
young men. Here was one who was catnip to women. Here was one who had
wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy.
Stark Young
By “wanting to be alone, "by refusing interviews, by avoiding the star-making game, Greta
Garbo (1 905— 1990) was successful more than most movie stars in existing only on the
screen. She wanted to seem to have no other existence than as the characters she played.
This quality was apparent right from the start of her career, when she positioned herself
apart from all other actresses and invented her own style of personal publicity, which was
nonpublicity. Stark Young, the film critic of the New Republic, analyzed her strategy
early in her career, in 1932.
Greta Garbo
Since Miss Greta Garbo came to America some years ago, her fame has grown
and grown. In her last picture, a Hollywood and rather nursery version of Pi¬
randello’s As You Desire Me, she has come to the end of her contract and to her
highest success; the piece has passed from one end of the country to the other
in triumph, and Miss Garbo has gone back to Sweden, to return or not to re¬
turn as the case may be. During all this time her position has steadily advanced.
As to her drawing capacity I know very little, these are delicate and falsified mat¬
ters on the whole, and what drawing power means, crowded box offices, I am
still uncertain. I remember once, coming back from Italy, half an hour after
Gibraltar, and just as we were passing the coast of Spain, with a vista magnifi¬
cent and everchanging, how most of the passenger list had hastened below decks
to see Jackie Coogan. There is no proverb about the ears and eyes of people being
the ears and eyes of God. Miss Garbo’s box office realities, nevertheless, are very
great and, I feel sure, have steadily increased, or there would not be so many
Stark Young
IS
pictures of her promulgated or efforts at spreading news, such news, that is, as
can be snappily concocted, about her, all of which costs the producers money.
Certainly it can be said that Miss Garbo is unique among Hollywood ladies
and curiously untouched by its vulgar silliness of report and its obvious and in¬
timate Kodak and journalism. Meantime she supplies an odd comment on our
public, with regard to its popular philosophy, its esthetic theory, and its soul.
Both satire and poetry and common dream are involved.
By Miss Garbo’s being a comment on the popular philosophy of a great peo¬
ple and a great democratic legend I mean two things. The first is in a lighter vein.
The managerial publicity for Miss Garbo, based soundly enough on facts, has cre¬
ated unceasingly the theme of her solitude. She does not make a part of crowds;
she has moments when she likes to be alone; she flees publicity; she likes to live
privately. In general this is a thought that almost strangles our average citizen.
What, not go to a committee, not ride forth, not take a part in the community;
if you can sing, not do it on the radio; if you are blessed with a motor, not speed
somewhere; if you have a house, not create a swarming for it; if you have emo¬
tions, not carry them and tell! At any rate, conceive of someone who stays in
when he could go out, who could see people but thinks it a kind of communion,
peace, rest, or right to be alone sometimes! This has made Miss Garbo almost
a national puzzle. It could have been explained away by making her a freak or a
high-hat. But she is neither. She is not even sick; Swedish people are athletic.
We must swallow it, then, as a cosmic mystery, this successful star really likes
at times to be alone.
In the course of democratic thought another point, much more serious, has
arisen. What are artists? Are they any different from anybody else? To this chal¬
lenge many of our artists of the theater have arisen. They are as everyday as every¬
body. I was told in Grand Rapids once of a singer from the Metropolitan who,
at a Rotarian dinner in his honor, told the diners that he was just like the rest of
them, no different, singing was his business just as bonding, banking, running a
laundry, was theirs. This was no doubt true, but it does not affect the question.
One of the things to ponder in the theater now, in the opera especially, is the
vast melee of fallen stars. They are not fallen from fiscal stardom, they are fallen
from glamor. As stars they are known for their hits, their successes, their salaries
and contracts, sometimes for their personalities, real or created by their agents
and managers; they remain just folks like the rest of us. That is the great balm.
But they are not the glamor and wonder of the heart, not any longer. As the
dramatist tells us in The Swan, royalty, like swans, should stay well away from
the bank; seen close at hand they are apt to be at best but waddling animals. So
it is in the theater ultimately, but not in democratic theory.
The sarcasm of all this is that Miss Garbo contradicts the whole business. We
know very little of her, not really. Visitors to Hollywood do not see her. Junior
76 Movie Stars
League conventions, given a dinner by the producers, with all the screen stars
lined up as hors d’oeuvres and flashlights as souvenirs, miss this one relish in the
lot; they see everybody but Greta Garbo, and though they like the haircut of
some great artist, they depart with a certain awe about this refusing Swedish
player. A little actress, renting Miss Garbo’s house, may get a picture published
of Garbo’s bed, renting publicity. Nor do we see photographs of Greta Garbo
meeting someone at the train or drinking Swedish punch with a millionaire, or
buried in the midst of a pile of books (wooden movie properties), or any other
blessed fiddledeedee for the popular heart. There were tricks in plenty among
the old stars. Patti was not without her special coaches and her parrots and im¬
perial gems, nor did the Bamum method leave untouched the great figure of
Bernhardt, who carried in her his soul’s epic. But when all was said and done,
their splendor and ability shone at the proper shining time. These ancient tricks
are tired now, overworked, and most stars are starry in long-runs, incomes, ro¬
mances, and scandals. It can be said that to Miss Garbo some of the glamor, old-
style, baffling, full of dreams, imaginings, and wonder, has returned. If nothing
else, in many instances, she is a blessed rebuff to the back-slapping and personal-
friend-of-mine citizens that appropriate the artists of the theater, who in their
turn are too scared of their positions, too greedy, or too mediocre themselves
to do anything different. It would be a sad day in our midst if our great ticket¬
buying public should learn one chief and simple fact about art, which is that a
great artist is like everybody else but is not like anybody else. Alas, equality and
the folks!
Esthetically, the case of Miss Greta Garbo is a kind of joke on the whole the¬
ater public. The realism-democracy theory that the great public holds concern¬
ing the theater tells us that acting is j ust being natural, being the character, things
as they are, none of the spouting and artificiality of the old fellows. Down deep,
this prose-nature business is the last thing wanted; most people, however flat,
want art to be art, without offending them by being anything different from any¬
thing else. The lurking dream is there, nevertheless, the desire for creation anew,
the fresh world of fiction, flux, or ideality. What they think they want would
be best found in the zoo, since nothing so acts like an elephant as an elephant.
What they really want is the difference between the moon in the sky and the
moon in the water; they want a new birth with a nameless difference; they want
resemblance with escape. What they declare and actually seek is what they
won’t like when they get it. The public arrives by things outside of its declara¬
tions, and obeys constantly forces it could never understand. In whatever style,
what people want in acting is acting. Miss Garbo solves this problem without
seeming to, and, for that matter, even when she is not acting at all. At the very
start her foreign accent gives her a certain removal. It is not necessarily a style,
a treatment, a definite elevation, or distillation; it is primarily a physical fact that
Stark Young
77
removes her from the ordinary and makes possible the illumination, unreality,
and remoteness that we thirst after. That remote entity of her spirit, a certain
noble poignancy in her presence, a certain solitary fairness, a sense of mood that
is giving and resisting at the same time: these defeat and break down the poor
little common theory of naturalness and prose method. This player is not hoity-
toity or highbrow or any of that, the public feels; she is not unnatural; she is like
somebody, they don’t know just who, but still—Her mere physical factual dis¬
tance from the audience parallels the distance that style in art assures and that
instinct expects, so that what they would deny in theory they now run after in
fact.
This is leaving out of account the side of the public’s relation to Miss Garbo
that is so much to its credit. People’s souls sense in her some concentration of
magnetism that they value. There is a muteness, inaccessibility, and beauty that
attracts both men and women. She presents an instance of the natural and right
progress of the poetic: from the concrete toward ideality. There is in her work
no cheapness of attack, it is clear that her services could not be obtained for
such effects. Her mind is not patently technical, her spirit not easily flexible,
so that it is mainly a larger something that comes off to the audience, and in the
future there will be a fuller development and radiance of her natural resources
according to her own study, training, and the influences to which she is sub¬
jected.
As to Miss Garbo’s performances, her creations of the roles assigned her, they
have been variable. Such a role as Mata Hari, in a silly play, with a cast made up
largely of lollipops and a brindling, venal atmosphere of Hollywood danger and
war, was not for her, though the piece could have been written for her partic¬
ular qualities. Romance was a cruel venture to subject her to, not because she
could not have played some Nordic artist, beautiful, absorbed, passionate, and
changing, but because she was burdened with creating a child of the sun, rich,
impish, swanlike, and typical, cosmic as legend, and this had no relation either
to her realm of feeling and beauty or her external technique. In Pirandello’s As
You Desire Me, Miss Garbo for the first time came, in my opinion, into her own,
so far forward indeed that this discussion of her must remain inadequate. For
the first time she seemed to me to show in her playing an inner delight and happy
dedication to the love and joy of it. Her stage movement has grown lighter and
more varied; the line of her hands has taken on a new and vivid life; and the di¬
versity in technical attack and in the player’s vitality seemed to me much greater.
The secret luminous center of such playing cannot be conveyed, of course, any
more than its shining fluency can be forgotten. Something is given in this play¬
ing of Miss Garbo’s that I have not seen given before, and from the moments of
her playing it seemed to me something radiant returned to her; she seemed to
me not another person but a new artist in her art.
78
Movie Stars
MAR.CELLE
Clements
Gregory Nava, the film director, once told me, "Whenever any question of style or taste
in dress comes up, I simply ask myself What would Fred Astaire have done?”
“They Can't Take That Away from Me”
Fred Astaire is my hero, and I don’t care who knows it. “Gimme a break!” sneer
the technocrats, the pseudodandies with the punk haircuts, all those who favor
business lunches and open relationships. Yes, they will mock, but I don’t care.
Indeed, my sentiments regarding Fred Astaire are almost of a missionary nature.
After all, everyone’s got his prescription for improving the world: these days,
social critics beg for less narcissism, environmentalists for conservation, and Re¬
publicans for lower taxes. I say Fred is our ticket. I say: Bring back moonlight!
Naturally, I speak of Fred Astaire as metaphor. Consider how certain con¬
cepts evoke, beyond themselves, the pinnacles of Western culture. The Acrop¬
olis. The sonata-allegro form. The British Museum. The Theory of Relativity.
Fred Astaire. But whereas in the history of our civilization there are many land¬
marks of power, money, and, more seldom, beauty and wisdom, only Astaire
consummately exemplifies casual elegance. I speak not merely of the now ven¬
erable dancer, but of the concept of the icon of finesse, the embodiment of grace,
the paragon of romance. Fred Astaire is the summum bonum of debonair charm,
a quality that, alas, is disappearing from our cultural shores.
I happen to believe that the public TV stations in this country should run Fred
Astaire movies all night, every night. It would indeed be a public service. We
could all go to sleep with the sets on and, just as we are subliminally influenced
by commercials we thought we hadn’t noticed, we might unconsciously absorb
some of the glorious Astaire allure that we who are stranded in the eighties so
desperately need. Think of all we’d learn: how to walk, how to dress, how to
banter, how to dance “The Piccolino.”
Marcelle Clements
79
But no, we enthusiasts are left to peruse local listings for the sporadic ap¬
pearance of our idol. He’s always worth the wait for the “Late, Late, Late Show.”
The more I see of these films, however, the more a bizarre and compelling urge
overtakes me. I want to find Fred Astaire. Not in Top Hat, not in Carefree, not in
Swing Time, but, you know, in Real Life. Not the literal Astaire, of course. What
I’m looking for is the Fred Astaire attitude, the mood, the subtle certain some¬
thing that made life seem, how shall I say, worthwhile, in 1935. • • ■
Needless to say, my search so far has been perfectly futile. Otherwise I
wouldn’t be writing this. I’d be dancing on some parquet floor wearing a dress
made of ostrich feathers. (And I’d be blond, but that’s beside the point.)
Why can’t I find Fred Astaire? Is his persona a total fiction? It’s odd, but the
Astaire character as I imagine it seems so plausible, so likely, that I simply can’t
understand why he’s only to be found on celluloid. Why, there must be hun¬
dreds, maybe even thousands of Fred Astaires out there. You know, guys who
can strike a jaunty pose next to a candelabra without getting their hair singed;
guys who assure you that not only are they in heaven but they can hardly speak
when they’re dancing with you cheek to cheek. Most guys I know won’t even
dance cheek to cheek except as a joke, and it’s usually with one another. But so
far I’m not discouraged. I’m keeping my hopes up and staying on the lookout.
One thing I’m convinced of: I’ll know the real thing when I see it.
I’m sure Fred Astaire doesn’t read paperbacks. (Whether he reads at all is
another matter, butnevermind, you know what I mean.) And he wouldn’t own
a digital clock. He’d never wake up angry in the morning. You couldn’t pay him
to be rude to a waiter. And he would never, never have a recording machine an¬
swer his telephone.
Speaking as a woman, I pine for Fred on numerous occasions. I pine, for ex¬
ample, when the man who walks into the restaurant ahead of me allows the door
to slam neatly in my face. I pine when my lover comes to breakfast in his Jockey
shorts. I pine when my editor rudely insults me without subsequently tearing
off my glasses and falling in love with me. (Actually, I believe it’s Humphrey
Bogart who tears off girls’ glasses and falls in love with them, but you get the
general idea. In fact, as it happens, I don’t wear glasses.) I even pine for Fred
Astaire seasonally. In the spring and summer, I pine for the tender hand-in-hand
walks in appropriately bucolic surroundings. And in the fall and winter, I pine
on schedule once a week, in splendid solitude, for the entire duration of “Mon¬
day Night Football.”
I think the trouble with young men today is that they don’t have any roman¬
tic ideals. And it’s no wonder: all of their role models are hicks, schlepps, stiffs,
or studs. After all, who is there? Richard Gere? Robert De Niro? Bill Murray?
Please. I mean, in your heart, you know these people have terrible table man¬
ners. And as for their wardrobes, it’s strickly heartbreak city.
I’m not saying they should bring back white tie and tails—though that would
8o
Movie Stars
be lovely at crucial points in a relationship, the first time a man spends the night
in one’s apartment, for example. But let’s be realistic; what with the frequency
of one-night stands these days, the dry-cleaning bills would be astronomical. Cer¬
tainly, the very least men could do, in memory of the great silhouette, would
be to try and develop some Attitude about what they wear, instead of content¬
ing themselves with whipping out their MasterCard as soon as they’ve found their
size. Think of how great Astaire always managed to look, though he may in fact
have been wearing a business suit, a sailor’s outfit, or even one of those ridicu¬
lous ascots.
And if you think dress is not all that important except on nights out, you are
sadly mistaken. “It is only the shallow people who do not judge by appearances,”
said Oscar Wilde, who knew a thing or two about such matters. Why, Fred As¬
taire looks impeccable in pajamas! His dress, his carriage, his manners all evoke
that sexiest of attributes, breeding. And that’s why, whether he was cast as a
millionaire, a psychiatrist, or a struggling vaudevillian, Astaire always managed
to convey an ambience of affluence and glamour. The Attitude, so well illus¬
trated by his wardrobe and, of course, his dancing, was also marvelously epit¬
omized by the tilt of his hat, the way he descended a staircase, the way he
phrased a song, the way he made Ginger Rogers feel, the rose in the bud vase.
No, no, they can’t take thataway from me.
Glamour, after all, is a state of mind. Granted, Astaire is a superb dancer.
And granted, he got plenty of help in his films by way of props, sets, the cos¬
tumes of his partners, to say nothing of some great scores. But for the truly ar¬
dent Astaire enthusiasts, for the hardcore, guts-to-the-wall fans, the most
splendid moments in the Astaire films are the simplest ones, those in which he
subtly turns the merely pedestrian gesture into the natural expression of exquisite
grace: his gait when he crosses the street, the way he enters a room, how he
holds his cane, the instant in a dance when he pauses and looks into his partner’s
eyes. Now, next time you’re spending the evening in a disco, look around. Need
I say more?
But my hero isn’t only charming, glamorous, refined, and elegant. He is also
honorable, brave, and audacious if need be, and this despite his obvious (and so
endearing!) natural timidity. Fred Astaire dared! He dared to go after the girl,
he dared to wear spats, he dared to call Audrey Hepburn “Funny Face,” he dared
to dance. He was somewhat homely, not particularly tall, much too skinny, yet
he dared, dared to be a movie star. But even when he was bold, he had grace—
none of this brassy vulgarity so evident in the behavior of the contemporary go-
for-it set. After all, would anyone ever accuse Fred Astaire of being coarse or
pushy? Certainly not. He remained modest and restrained and he still got the
girl or the job. Even when he had a temporary setback, he did not throw a nasty
tantrum. If Joan Fontaine was (for the moment) unresponsive, he did not turn
Marcelle Clements
8 i
on her like a Doberman pinscher and inform her that she was a repressed les¬
bian and a disgusting ballbreaker. No, not once in any of his numerous films did
Astaire ever exhibit the urge to utter a primal scream. I guess no therapist had
ever told Fred to Look Out for Number One. He may have sulked every once
in a while, but he always remained civilized. At worst, he’d go out in the Lon¬
don fog and sing a little.
In fact, Astaire’s boyish cheer is part of his appeal. It seems impossible not
to be fond of Fred Astaire. He is inexhaustibly good-natured. (Who else could
put up with Edward Everett Horton?) Even in these cynical times, his perenni¬
ally winsome mien seems pleasant rather than irritating. And I speak as one who
is ready to kill when a waiter says “Enjoy” as he places a plate in the vicinity of
my seething bosom and clenched jaw. . . . The Astaire genius consists in never
dancing over the line. And this is the magic one looks for, in vain, among the
business-lunch/open-relationship types: good cheer without doltism, warmth
without mawkishness, elegance without archness, nonchalance without indif¬
ference, and excellence devoid of arrogance. He embodied that uniquely Amer¬
ican combination of energy and looseness, but he added to it a Continental
gloss, the result being an irresistible melange of chic and good humor. He’s per¬
fect.
All right, I know. I know the Astaire films are hokey. I know people watch
them as camp artifacts, as frivolous confections filled with air. But let them eat
hot dogs. As for me, I’m hooked on souffles. I’ll take it: the candelabra, the car¬
nation in the lapel, the bashful smile, the top hat, and even “The Yam.” I can’t
help it. Try as I might to maintain the proper contemporary disdain for sexist
film themes, and as much as I may attempt to regard with mere contemptuous
amusement the absurd plots with their chestnut devices of mistaken identities
and the inevitability of the wedded-bliss conclusions, I can’t help it, I'm sold.
As far as I’m concerned, the worst part of watching Fred Astaire movies is the
bilious aftermath of two solid hours of being jealous of Ginger Rogers.
Just think how much better the world would be if more people felt as I do:
All personal problems would be resolved as soon as boy got girl, which would
invariably occur. There’d be champagne parties every night, and all the men
would be clever and wonderful dancers, and all the women would be beautiful
blondes wearing dresses made of ostrich feathers. Why, there’d even be moon¬
light again.
82
Movie Stars
Robert Lewis Taylor
Has the death ofrepertory theaters finally killed thefashionfor W. C.Fields (18J9—I946)?
In the 1960s Fields enjoyed a huge revival on college campuses, where students recited his
dialogue along with him. There was even a featurefilm based on his life, with Fields im¬
personated eerily by Rod Steiger. Then Fields drifted out of favor, and in the age of home
video young viewers program their own revivals and seem not to have stumbled on him;
his name is relatively unknown on campuses today. Fields’s anarchic misogynism is, how¬
ever, timeless, and no doubt he will drift back into view. The best book about his life is by
Robert Lewis Taylor, who makes little attempt to separate the Fields of fact and legend,
perhaps because for Fields himself the line was blurred. Fields was known for dialogue that
seemed to drift perilously close to obscenity while always remaining apparently innocent,
and for his drinking, which in his movies was presented as the permanent preoccupation
of his characters, even while they were engrossed in other activities. Groucho Marx, who
was a friend of Fields’s, told me in 1972: “He had a ladder leading up to his attic. With¬
out exaggeration, there wasffty thousand dollars of liquor up there. Crated up like a
wharf I’m standing there and Fields is standing there, and nobody says anything. The
silence is oppressive. Finally, he speaks: ‘This will carry me twenty-five years.
from W. C. Fields: His Follies and
Fortunes
Fields’ favorite exclamations—“Godfrey Daniel,” “Mother of Pearl,” “Drat!” and
others—always had a peculiar standing at the Hays office. Just as many come¬
dians have been able, on the legitimate stage, to utter the fiercest oaths and make
them sound innocent, Fields could voice tea-party pleasantries and make them
sound profane. An audience, seeing the wicked leer and sensing the unfathomable
mischief behind his frosty, belligerent stare, realized that, whatever he might
Robert Lewis Taylor
83
say, he meant considerable more, so that “Godfrey Daniel!” always came out
“Goddamn,” not only to the Hays office but to the general public. In spite of
this, the essential fraudulence of his established character removed the sting from
all hints of the grossest immorality.
The censors were obliged to keep an especially alert eye on Fields’ educa¬
tional efforts for children, both in the script and on the set. There can be no ques¬
tion that Fields disliked children, in a persecuted, un-angry sort of way. His
encounters with the infant thespian, Baby LeRoy, with whom he played in sev¬
eral films, were well known to Hollywood. He considered that the child was
deliberately trying to wreck his career, and he stalked him remorselessly. “When
he stole entire scenes from Baby LeRoy in Tillie and Gus a year and a half ago,
his greatness was acknowledged,” a reporter said of Fields in 193 j. The come¬
dian realized that, whatever else might be going on in a scene, people would
watch the antics of a baby. His competitive treatment of LeRoy was, therefore,
exactly the same as he would have accorded an adult. Between takes he sat in a
corner, eyed the child, and muttered vague, injured threats.
In one Fields-LeRoy picture directed by Norman Taurog, action was sus¬
pended so that the infant could have his orange juice. When the others busied
themselves with scripts, Fields approached the child’s nurse and said, “Why don’t
you take a breather? I’ll give the little nipper his juice.” She nodded gratefully,
and left the set.
With a solicitous nursery air, Fields shook the bottle and removed its nipple,
then he drew a flask from his pocket and strengthened the citrus with a gener¬
ous noggin of gin.
Baby LeRoy, a popular, warm-hearted youngster, showed his appreciation
by gulping down the dynamite with a minimum of the caterwauling that distin¬
guishes the orange-juice hour in so many homes. But when the shooting was
ready to recommence, he was in a state of inoperative bliss.
Taurog and others, including the returned nurse, inspected the tot with real
concern. “1 don’t believe he’s just sleepy,” said the nurse. “He had a good night’s
rest.”
“Jiggle him some more,” suggested Taurog. “We’re running a little behind
schedule.”
Several assistants broke into cries of “Hold it!” “Stand by with Number
Seven!” and “Make-up—LeRoy’s lost his color!”
“Walk him around, walk him around,” was Fields’ hoarse and baffling com¬
ment from a secluded corner.
The child was more or less restored to consciousness, but in the scene that
followed, Taurog complained of his lack of animation. Despite the most urgent
measures to revive him he remained glassy-eyed and in a partial coma. For some
inexplicable reason Fields seemed jubilant.
84 Movie Stars
“He’s no trouper,” he kept yelling. “The kid’s no trouper. Send him home.”
Several years later, when Baby LeRoy was grown to boyhood, Fields heard
he was re-entering films. “The kid's no trouper,” the comedian told several peo¬
ple. “He’ll never make a comeback.” LeRoy did come back, however, and con¬
tinued to perform successfully.
Fields always thought that one of the most agreeable events in his movie ca¬
reer took place in The Old-Fashioned Way, during a scene with the troublesome
LeRoy. In the course of a boarding-house meal, the infant dropped Fields’ watch
in the molasses, turned over his soup, and hit him in the face with a spoonful of
cream. After dinner, by chance, Fields found himself in a room alone with his
tormentor, who was in the all-fours stance on the carpet. Tiptoeing up softly,
his face filled with benevolence, he took a full leg swing and kicked the happy
youngster about six feet. The comedian threw himself into this scene, as he tried
to do with all his pictures, and wrapped up some splendid footage for Paramount.
But his conscience must have bothered him, for the next day he appeared on
the set with presents for Baby LeRoy. It taxes the historian’s ingenuity to ex¬
plain the many paradoxes of Fields. While he was authentically jealous of the
child, he made sheepish and comradely gestures on the sly. One time when Baby
LeRoy’s option was due, Fields needlessly wrote a part for him into one of his
pictures, to emphasize the child’s importance to the studio. In his home the co¬
median once had a photograph, prominently displayed, of himself and the child
star riding kiddie cars. And yet, asked in interviews how he liked children, or
child actors, he always replied with a sincere growl, “Fried,” or “Parboiled,” or
something equally unaffectionate.
Of Fields’ several peculiarities, his drinking aroused the widest interest and
misinformation. By the middle of his movie period his need for alcohol had
crystallized into a habit pattern from which he deviated only slightly until the
end of his life. On the radio, in interviews, often in the movies, he was pictur¬
ed as a frequent drunk, a rip who enjoyed wild excesses and spent a lot of time
under tables. It would be difficult to imagine a more erroneous conception.
Fields drank steadily, but he abhorred drunks. Drunken visitors in his home
seldom came back a second time. The signs of drunkenness—thick speech, un¬
steady gait, rowdiness, overemotional confidences—filled him with unease and
disgust. Of one of the best-known figures of the American stage, after a party
at Fields’ house, Fields said to his secretary, “Never let that fellow come through
these doors again.” The comedian once sulked for weeks at John Barrymore, of
whom he was particularly fond, because the great lover, in elevating his feet to
relax, scratched up Fields’ favorite sofa. “All that Romeo stuff s gone to his head,”
Fields told his secretary as he telephoned some inexpensive upholsterers.
In his later years, he started a day off with two double martinis before break-
Bob Hope and Bob Thomas 85
fast. He arose about nine o’clock, took a shower, came downstairs, and drank
the martinis slowly, on a porch or terrace if the day was fine. His breakfast was
modest, by the most austere standards. A small glass of pineapple juice gener¬
ally sufficed, but if he was especially ravenous, he added a piece of toast and an¬
other martini to the menu. The liquor had no apparent effect save to sharpen,
ever so slightly, his usual morning good humor and enhance his appreciation of
the California weather, which he loved. After breakfast, before going to work,
whether he was employed at the studios or occupied with scripts at home, he
walked over his grounds for an hour. He inspected his flowers, an exercise that
became a guiding passion in his life. Fields was one of the great nature men of
his generation. His cultivation of flowers and his pride at exhibiting them to
guests were not affected; he was happiest, some of his friends believed, when
he was submerged in horticulture and removed from the strain of society. He
had a tendency, however, to personalize his flowers, which occasionally plagued
him as people did. He once called up Gregory La Cava, who devoted many hours,
in the California manner, to watering plants, and said, “I want you to come right
over here—I’ve got some Jack roses that are blooming as big as cabbages.”
“Oh, nonsense,” La Cava replied. “There isn’t any such thing. I’m busy.”
Fields insisted, with angry trumpetings, and La Cava left his house at Malibu
Beach and drove over, a trip of several miles. The day was warm, the traffic brisk,
and it was some time before he arrived. Fields growled at the delay, but ush¬
ered him swiftly down a lane toward the waiting exhibit. The roses had appar¬
ently made their bow for the morning; when their sponsor arrived with his guest
they had retreated into small, tight buds. Fields was enraged. He ran up and down
the lane, lashing at the offenders with a cane, and crying, “Bloom! Bloom, damn
you! Bloom for my friend!”
Bob Hope and
Bob Thomas
Bob Hope has become such an American icon in his later years that it’s easy to forget how
brash and irreverent he was as a young pe former. When someone like Woody Allen seri¬
ously holds him up as an idol, it helps us to brush aside the Christmas specials and the
86
Movie Stars
golf classics and Hope entertaining the troops and to remember hisfirst-rate movie come¬
dies and his long-running Road series with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. Here Hope
remembers, mostly in inevitable one-liners and no doubt with the truth greatly gilded, his
adventures on the Roads.
from The Road to Hollywood
Like Webster’s dictionary,
We’re Morocco-bound . . .
Ah yes, in 1942, Bing, Dotty, and I were off on our merry adventures again. As
in the first Road, Tony Quinn was the heavy—this was long before Zorba the
Greek had opened up his first restaurant. Directing The Road to Morocco —the
three Bs. No, not Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, but Blubberbutt Butler.
Dave was a cagey character. He knew that Bing and I spent half our studio
time on the phone, talking about our radio shows, our investments, and other
minor matters. Dave wanted our full attention. In those days there was only one
telephone on a movie set; not even the biggest star had a phone in his dressing
room. So Dave ordered the assistant director to station the phone for The Road
to Morocco a block and a half away from the set where we were working.
Not only that. The telephone was installed under a pile of lumber, so that
anyone answering it would have to slide in horizontally to pick up the receiver.
Dave’s answer to AT&T worked well until the day that Sam Goldwyn called.
It came at a time when Dave was directing a crowd scene that involved a cou¬
ple of hundred mules and twice that many people.
“Mr. Goldwyn is calling you, Mr. Butler,” the assistant director said.
Dave told Bing and me and the entire company to wait, then he trudged across
the sound stage and into the next one and slid under the lumber pile. “Hello,
Sam. What is it?” Dave said.
Goldwyn was working on the script that Dave was going to direct next—for
me, as it turned out. For fifteen minutes, Goldwyn expounded on the intrica¬
cies of the story while the Road to Morocco company waited. Finally Goldwyn said,
“Thanks very much for calling me,” and hung up.
We had a lot of adventures on The Road to Morocco, and some of them were
in the script. The real ones were lots of fun—it says here.
Like the time Bing and I were washed up on the North African coast. A camel
sneaks up behind us and licks us on the cheeks. We begin to think it’s love at
second sight until we see that it was a camel doing the kissing, not each other.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been kissed by a camel, but I’ve got to tell you
87
Bob Hope and Bob Thomas
that it’s not like being kissed by Raquel Welch. This particular camel may have
been listening to my radio show, because after he kissed me, he spat right in my
face.
You wouldn’t believe what a camel stores up in his chaw. I thought I had been
hit by the Casbah Garbage Department.
When you see The Road to Morocco on the late show, you’ll notice that I stag¬
ger out of the scene when the camel spits at me. Bing broke up, and I was gasp¬
ing for breath, but Dave kept the camera rolling.
“Great scene,” he said afterward.
“But don’t you want another take?” I said, wiping the muck out of my eyes.
“The whole crew was laughing, and I disappeared out of the frame.”
“No, that’s it,” Dave replied. For years afterward, people asked him, “How
did you get that camel to spit at Hope on cue?” Dave replied, “I worked with
that beast for weeks until it responded to my direction.”
Dave was full of tricks. During one scene in The Road to Morocco, Bing and I
were to be chased through the Casbah by Arabian horsemen. Dave had hired an
old pal to lead the stunt riders—Ken Maynard, the cowboy star.
I guess Ken was trying to make a show of it. Because when Dave gave the
cue, Ken led his horsemen through the Casbah like the first furlong of the Ken¬
tucky Derby.
“My God, Paramount wants to get rid of us!” I yelled as I saw the horses charg¬
ing at me.
“We never should have asked for a raise,” Bing agreed. He made a flying dive,
and I jumped off the set, landing on the concrete floor.
“Cut!” Dave yelled. “Great shot!”
“Great shot!” Bing replied. “You almost killed Bob and me!”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Dave said. “Not until the final scene, anyway.”
That wasn’t the first time that I learned movies could be a risky business. In
my first picture, The Big Broadcast of 1938, there was a running gag that Martha
Raye would break mirrors every time she looked into them. For one shipboard
scene, she was supposed to look into a room-length mirror and the thing would
crack.
A funny scene, but it almost turned into a tragedy. The special-effects men
put too much air pressure behind the mirror. When Martha looked into it, the
huge mirror shattered with the noise of a cannon, and thousands of glass frag¬
ments were blasted toward us. It was a miracle that no one was seriously hurt.
Several years later, Bing and I were making The Road to Utopia. One of the
scenes called for Bing and me to bed down in our Klondike cabin and be joined
by a bear. A real bear. They told us it was a very tame bear, but Bing and I had
our doubts.
We climbed under a rug and feigned sleep. The bear came sniffing up to us.
Then we heard a growl. Right then I had laundry problems.
88
Movie Stars
“Did you hear what I heard?” Bing asked.
“I sure did,” I said. “Lead the way, Dad.”
W e set an Olympic record for leaping out of bed—Errol Flynn couldn’t have
done it faster.
“That’s it with the bear,” Bing announced, and I heartily agreed. The next
day, the same bear tore an arm off his trainer.
One day on Utopia, we were shooting a glacier scene on the De Mille stage—
named after Cecil B. because he shot many of his epics there. Bing and I were
supposed to be climbing a wall of ice, and we were doing it many feet above the
stage floor. Ordinarily there were mattresses beneath us, but somebody moved
them.
Right in the middle of the scene the rope broke, and Bing and I went tum¬
bling down. I looked for a soft spot to land and found it: Crosby. His back hasn’t
been the same since.
Over the years, I have been subjected to many more indignities, all for the
sake of Art. If I ever catch him, I’m going to kill the guy.
Lauren Bacall
Bacall’s memoir of her early days in Hollywood is one of the best movie star autobiogra¬
phies because she remembers so vividly. Reading her description of how she held her head
low to conceal its trembling, I went back to look at that scene in Howard Hawks’s To
Have and Have Not again and saw it through different eyes. Once you have the clue,
Bacall turns from a sultry woman into a scared kid. Then you blink, and she’s the woman
again—for the rest of her career.
from By Myself
I went onto the set the first day of shooting to see Howard and Bogart—I would
not be working until the second day. Bogart’s wife, Mayo Methot, was there—
Lauren Bacall
8 9
he introduced us. I talked to Howard, watched for a while, and went home to
prepare for my own first day.
It came and I was ready for a straitjacket. Howard had planned to do a single
scene that day—my first in the picture. I walked to the door of Bogart’s room,
said, “Anybody got a match?,” leaned against the door, and Bogart threw me a
small box of matches. I lit my cigarette, looking at him, said “Thanks,” threw
the matches back to him, and left. Well—we rehearsed it. My hand was shak¬
ing—my head was shaking—the cigarette was shaking. I was mortified. The
harder I tried to stop, the more I shook. What must Howard be thinking? What
must Bogart be thinking? What must the crew be thinking? Oh God, make it
stop! I was in such pain.
Bogart tried to joke me out of it—he was quite aware that I was a new young
thing who knew from nothing and was scared to death. Finally Howard thought
we could try a take. Silence on the set. The bell rang. “Quiet—we’re rolling,”
said the sound man. “Action,” said Howard. This was for posterity, I thought—
for real theatres, for real people to see. I came around the comer, said my first
line, and Howard said, “Cut.” He had broken the scene up—the first shot
ended after the first line. The second set-up was the rest of it—then he’d move
in for close-ups. By the end of the third or fourth take, I realized that one way
to hold my trembling head still was to keep it down, chin low, almost to my
chest, and eyes up at Bogart. It worked, and turned out to be the beginning of
“The Look.”
I found out very quickly that day what a terrific man Bogart was. He did every¬
thing possible to put me at ease. He was on my side. I felt safe—I still shook,
but I shook less. He was not even remotely a flirt. I was, but I didn’t flirt with
him. There was much kidding around—our senses of humor went well to¬
gether. Bogie’s idea, of course, was that to make me laugh would relax me. He
was right to a point, but nothing on earth would have relaxed me completely!
The crew were wonderful—fun and easy. It was a very happy atmosphere.
I would often go to lunch with Howard. One day he told me he was very happy
with the way I was working, but that I must remain somewhat aloof from the
crew. Barbara Stanwyck, whom he thought very highly of—he’d made Ball of
Fire with her, a terrific movie—was always fooling around with the crew, and
he thought it a bad idea. “They don’t like you any better for it. When you fin¬
ish a scene, go back to your dressing room. Don’t hang around the set—don’t
give it all away—save it for the scenes.” He wanted me in a cocoon, only to
emerge for work. Bogart could fool around to his heart’s content—he was a star
and a man—“though you notice he doesn’t do too much of it.”
One day at lunch when Howard was mesmerizing me with himself and his
plans for me, he said, “Do you notice how noisy it is in here suddenly? That’s
because Leo Forbstein just walked in—Jews always make more noise.” I felt that
9 °
Movie Stars
I was turning white, but I said nothing. I was afraid to—a side of myself I have
never liked or been proud of—a side that was always there .Howard didn ’ t dwell
on it ever, but clearly he had very definite ideas about Jews—none too favor¬
able, though he did business with them. They paid him—they were good for
that. I would have to tell him about myself eventually or he’d find out through
someone else. When the time came, what would happen would happen, but I
had no intention of pushing it.
Howard started to line up special interviews for me. Nothing big would be
released until just before the picture, and everything would be chosen with the
greatest care. Life, Look, Kyle Crichton for Collier’s, Pic, Saturday EveningPost. Only
very special fan magazines. Newspapers. I probably had more concentrated cov¬
erage than any beginning young actress had ever had—due to Hawks, not me.
Hoagy Carmichael had written a song called “Baltimore Oriole.” Howard was
going to use it as my theme music in the movie—every time I appeared on screen
there were to be strains of that song. He thought it would be marvelous if I could
be always identified with it—appear on Bing Crosby’s or Bob Hope’s radio show,
have the melody played, have me sing it, finally have me known as the “Balti¬
more Oriole.” What a fantastic fantasy life Howard must have had! His was a
glamorous, mysterious, tantalizing vision—but it wasn’t me.
On days 1 didn’t have lunch with Howard, I would eat with another actor or
the publicity man or have a sandwich in my room or in the music department
during a voice lesson. I could not sit at a table alone. Bogie used to lunch at the
Lakeside Golf Club, which was directly across the road from the studio.
One afternoon I walked into Howard’s bungalow and found a small, gray¬
haired, mustached, and attractive man stretched out on the couch with a book
in his hand and a pipe in his mouth. That man was William Faulkner. He was
contributing to the screenplay. Howard loved Faulkner—they had known each
other a long time, had hunted together. Faulkner never had much money and
Howard would always hire him for a movie when he could. He seldom came to
the set—he was very shy—he liked it better in Howard’s office.
Howard had a brilliantly creative work method. Each morning when we got
to the set, he, Bogie, and I and whoever else might be in the scene, and the script
girl would sit in a circle in canvas chairs with our names on them and read the
scene. Almost unfailingly Howard would bring in additional dialogue for the
scenes of sex and innuendo between Bogie and me. After we’d gone over the
words several times and changed whatever Bogie or Howard thought should be
changed, Howard would ask an electrician for a work light—one light on the
set—and we’d go through the scene on the set to see how it felt. Howard said,
“Move around—see where it feels most comfortable.” Only after all that had
been worked out did he call Sid Hickox and talk about camera set-ups. It is the
perfect way for movie actors to work, but of course it takes time.
Lauren Bacall
9 i
After about two weeks of shooting I wrote to my mother—she’d read one
or two things in newspapers about my not having the first lead opposite Bogart—
Please, darling, don’t worry about what is written in the newspapers concern¬
ing first and second leads. You make me so goddamn mad—what the hell dif¬
ference does it make? As long as when the public sees the picture they know that
I’m the one who is playing opposite Bogart. Everything is working out beauti¬
fully for me. Howard told Charlie the rushes were sensational. He’s really very
thrilled with them. I’m still not used to my face, however. Bogie has been a dream
man. We have the most wonderful times together. I'm insane about him. We
kid around—he’s always gagging—trying to break me up and is very, very fond
of me. So if I were you, I’d thank my lucky stars, as I am doing and not worry
about those unimportant things. The only thing that’s important is that I am good
in the picture and the public likes me.
I don’t know how it happened—it was almost imperceptible. It was about
three weeks into the picture—the end of the day—I had one more shot, was
sitting at the dressing table in the portable dressing room combing my hair. Bogie
came in to bid me good night. He was standing behind me—we were joking as
usual—when suddenly he leaned over, put his hand under my chin, and kissed
me. It was impulsive—he was a bit shy—no lunging wolf tactics. He took a worn
package of matches out of his pocket and asked me to put my phone number on
the back. I did. I don’t know why I did, except it was kind of part of our game.
Bogie was meticulous about not being too personal, was known for never fool¬
ing around with women at work or anywhere else. He was not that kind of man,
and also he was married to a woman who was a notorious drinker and fighter.
A tough lady who would hit you with an ashtray, lamp, anything, as soon as not.
I analyzed nothing then—I was much too happy—I was having the time of
my life. All that mattered to me was getting to the studio and working—my
hours of sleep just got in the way! From the start of the movie, as Bogie and I
got to know each other better—as the joking got more so—as we had more fun
together—so the scenes changed little by little, our relationship strengthened
on screen and involved us without our even knowing it. I certainly didn’t know
it. Gradually my focus began to shift away from Howard, more toward Bogie.
Oh, I still paid full attention to Howard, but I think I depended more on Bogie.
The construction of the scenes made that easy. I’m sure Howard became aware
fairly early on that there was something between us and used it in the film.
At the end of the day of the phone number, I went home as usual to my rou¬
tine: after eating something, I looked at my lines for the next day and got into
bed. Around eleven o’clock the phone rang. It was Bogie. He’d had a few
drinks, was away from his house, just wanted to see how I was. He called me
Slim—I called him Steve, as in the movie. We joked back and forth—he finally
9*
Movie Stars
said good night, he’d see me on the set. That was all, but from that moment on
our relationship changed. He invited me to lunch at Lakeside a few times—or
we’d sit in my dressing room or his with the door open, finding out more about
one another. If he had a chess game going on the set—he was a first-rate chess
player—I’d stand and watch, stand close to him. Physical proximity became
more and more important. But still we joked.
Hedda Hopper came on the set one day and said, “Better be careful. You might
have a lamp dropped on you one day.”
Peter. Bogdanovich
Humphrey Bogan (1899—1957) somehow succeeded in being an every man and a movie
star at the same time. In Treasure of the Sierra Madre, his baffled dismay in the face
of his own greed is shown with an actor’s humility that other stars might have resisted.
And notice how in Casablanca he becomes a self-sacrificing patriot without ever once seem¬
ing to go for that effect. In the 1960s, before he began directing, Peter Bogdanovich was
part of the group of writers who created the New Journalism, often in articles written for
the great editor Harold Hayes at Esquire magazine. This articlefrom the September 1964
Esquire does as good a job as anything I’ve read of explaining the Bogart mystique.
“Bogie in Excelsis”
Usually he wore the trench coat unbuttoned, just tied with the belt, and a slouch
hat, rarely tilted. Sometimes it was a captain’s cap and a yachting jacket. Almost
always his trousers were held up by a cowboy belt. You know the kind: one an
Easterner, waiting for a plane out of Phoenix, buys just as a joke and then takes
a liking to. Occasionally, he’d hitch up his slacks with it, and he often jabbed his
thumbs behind it, his hands ready for a fight or a dame.
Whether it was Sirocco or Casablanca, Martinique or Sahara, he was the only
American around (except maybe for the girl) and you didn’t ask him how he got
Peter Bogdanovich
93
there, and he always worked alone—except for the fellow who thought he took
care of him, the rummy, the piano player, the one he took care of, the one you
didn’t mess with. There was very little he couldn’t do, and in a jam he could do
anything: remove a slug from a guy’s arm, fix a truck that wouldn’t start. He
was an excellent driver, knowing precisely how to take those curves or how to
lose a guy that was tailing him. He could smell a piece of a broken glass and tell
you right away if there’d been poison in it, or he could walk into a room and
know just where the button was that opened the secret door. At the wheel of a
boat, he was beautiful.
His expression was usually sour and when he smiled only the lower lip
moved. There was a scar on his upper lip, maybe that’s what gave him the faint
lisp. He would tug meditatively at his earlobe when he was trying to figure some¬
thing out and every so often he had a strange little twitch—a kind of backward
jerk of the sides of his mouth coupled with a slight squinting of the eyes. He held
his cigarette (a Chesterfield) cupped in his hand. He looked right holding a gun.
Unsentimental was a good word for him. “Leave ’im where he is,” he might
say to a woman whose husband has just been wounded. “I don’t want 'im bleed¬
ing all over my cushions.” And blunt: “I don’t like you. I don’t like your friends
and I don’t like the idea of her bein’ married to you.” And straight: “When a
man's partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make
any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you're sup¬
posed to do something about it.”
He was tough; he could stop you with a look or a line. “Go ahead, slap me,”
he’d say, or, “That’s right, go for it,’’and there was in the way he said it just the
right blend of malice, gleeful anticipation and the promise of certain doom. He
didn’t like taking orders. Or favors. It was smart not to fool around with him
too much.
As far as the ladies were concerned, he didn’t have too much trouble with
them, except maybe keeping them away. It was the girl who said if he needed
anything, all he had to do was whistle: he never said that to the girl. Most of the
time he’d call her “angel,” and if he liked her he’d tell her she was “good, awful
good.”
Whatever he was engaged in, whether it was being a reporter, a saloon¬
keeper, a gangster, a detective, a fishing-boat owner, a D. A., or a lawyer, he
was impeccably, if casually, a complete professional. “You take chances,” some¬
one would say. “I get paid to,” was his answer. But he never took himself too
seriously. What was his job, a girl would ask. Conspiratorially, he'd lean in and
say with the slightest flicker of a grin, “I’m a private dick on a case.” He wasn’t
going to be taken in by Art either; he’d been to college, but he was a bit suspi¬
cious of the intellectuals. If someone mentioned Proust, he’d ask, “Who's he?,”
even though he knew.
94
Movie Scars
Finally, he was wary of Causes. He liked to get paid for taking chances. He
was a man who tried very hard to be Bad because he knew it was easier to get
along in the world that way. He always failed because of an innate goodness which
surely nauseated him. Almost always he went from belligerent neutrality to re¬
luctant commitment. From: “I stick my neck out for nobody ,”To:“l’m no good
at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little
people don’t amount to a hill o’ beans in this crazy world.” At the start, if the
question was, “What are your sympathies?,” the answer was invariably, “Mind¬
ing my own business.” But by the end, if asked why he was helping, risking his
life, he might say, “Maybe ’cause I like you. Maybe ’cause I don’t like them.”
Of course it was always “maybe” because he wasn’t going to be that much of a
sap, wasn’t making any speeches, wasn’t going to be a Good guy. Probably he
rationalized it: “I’m just doing my job.” But we felt good inside. We knew bet¬
ter.
Several months ago, the New Yorker Theatre in Manhattan ran a cycle of thirty
Humphrey Bogart movies. A one-day double bill of The Big Sleep and To Have
and Have Not broke all their attendance records. “I had two hundred people sit¬
ting on the floor,” said Daniel Talbot, owner of the 8 30-seat revival house and
one of the two producers of Point oj Order. “It was wild. I had to turn away a cou¬
ple of hundred people. And that audience! First time Bogie appeared they ap¬
plauded, and that was just the beginning. Any number of scenes got hands. And
the laughs! Bogart is very hot right now,” Talbot explained. “It’s more than a
cult, it’s something else too. He’s not consciously hip, but hip by default. You
get the feeling that he lives up to the Code. Anyone who screws up deserves the
fate of being rubbed out by Bogart. He’s also very American, and his popular¬
ity, I think, is a reaction to this currently chic craze for foreign films and things
foreign in general. With Bogart you get a portrait of a patriot, a man interested
in the landscape of America. I think he’s an authentic American hero—more
existential than, say, Cooper, but as much in the American vein, and more able
to cope with the present.” Talbot paused and grinned. “Frankly, I just like to
watch him at work. He hits people beautifully.”
The French have a more intellectual, if nonetheless affectionate, approach to
Bogart and the legend he has left behind. As Belmondo stares mystically at a photo
of Bogart in Godard’s Breathless, slowly exhaling cigarette smoke and rubbing
his lip with his thumb, he murmurs wistfully, “Bogie . . .” and you can almost
hear his director’s thoughts, echoed, for instance, in the words of the late Andre
Bazin, probably France’s finest film critic. “Bogart is the man with a past,” he
wrote in Cahiersdu Cinema in 19 37, a month after Bogart died. “When he comes
into a film, it is already 1 the morning after ’; sardonically victorious in his macabre
Peter Bogdanovich
95
combat with the angel, his face scared by what he has seen, and his step heavy
from all he has learned, having ten times triumphed over his death, he will surely
survive for us this one more time. . . . The Bogartian man is not defined by his
contempt for bourgeois virtues, by his courage or cowardice, but first of all by
his existential maturity which little by little transforms life into a tenacious
irony at the expense of death.” Of course, the French too can have a more basic
approach. “Finally in full color,” wrote Robert Lachenay in the same magazine,
“we see Bogie as he was in real life—as he was to Betty Bacall every night on his
pillow. ... I loved Bogart even better then. ...”
The Bogart cult has been perpetuated for the last several years in colleges all
over the United States. “I met a Harvard fellow recently,” said writer Nathaniel
Benchley, “who believed in only two things: the superiority of Harvard and the
immortality of Humphrey Bogart.” During every exam period in Cambridge, it
has become customary for the Brattle Theatre to run a Bogart film festival. Some¬
times they don’t even list the pictures: they just put a large photograph of him
outside the theatre. It seems to be enough. Walk into the Club Casablanca (in
the same building) and ask one of the undergraduates. “Bogart has a coolness you
can’t get away from,” he might tell you. “It’s a wryness, a freedom,” he’ll say,
at the same time denying that there is a real cult and that he’s just so refreshing,
so pleasantly removed from their academic world. “There’s no crap about Bo¬
gart,” another student may observe. “He’s also kind of anti-European and pro-
American. Like he dumps on the European, you know what I mean?” By this
time his date won’t be able to control herself any longer. “He’s so masculine!”
she’ll blurt out. “He’s so fantastically tough!” Was he? “He satirized himself a
great deal,” said writer Betty Comden. Raymond Massey recalled an incident
during the shooting of Action in the North Atlantic (1943): “The scene called for
our doubles to jump from the bridge of a burning tanker into the water below,
which was aflame with oil. Bogie turned to me and said, 'My double is braver
than yours. ’ I said that wasn’t so, that my double was the bravest man. Then Bogie
looked at me and he said, ‘The fact is I’m braver than you are.’ I said that was
nonsense. And the next thing I knew we did the doggone stunt ourselves.”
Massey chuckled. “I burned my pants off and Bogie singed his eyebrows.”
To Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who’d directed him in The Barefoot Contessa (19J4),
Bogart’s toughness was a facade. “You’d be having dinner with him,” he said,
“and someone would come over and you could just see the tough guy coming
on.” And to Chester Morris: “He had a protective shell of seeming indifference.
He wasn’t, but he did a lotta acting offstage. He liked to act tough, liked to talk
out of the side of his mouth.” Writer Nunnally Johnson said Bogart was con¬
vinced that people would have been disappointed if he didn’t act tough with
them. “A fan came over during dinner one time,” said Johnson, “and Bogie told
him to beat it. When the guy got back to his table I heard his companion say,
96
Movie Stars
quite happily, ‘See, I told ya he’d insult you.’ ” Johnson reflected a moment.
“But he was a lot tougher than I would be and a lot tougher than most people I
know. I remember one time Judy Garland and her husband, Sid Luft, were at
his home. Now Luft was a big alley fighter and a good deal broader than Bogart.
But Bogie got annoyed about something or other and he walked right over to
Luft, who also was a good head taller, and nodded at Judy. ‘Would you take
that dame out of this house,’ he said, ‘and never comeback.’ Luft kind oflooked
at him a moment and then he took her out.” Johnson smiled. “Bogie took big
risks.”
Adlai Stevenson didn’t find him that way. “He wasn’t tough, not really,” said
the Ambassador. “He was, to me, a nonconformist. He had a cynicism without
being unhealthy. He had great curiosity and an arch kind of skepticism.” And
still another opinion: “He was a pushover,” said Lauren Bacall.
“I never broke through his barrier,” said critic John McLain. “1 don’t think any¬
one really got underneath. Bogart didn’t unburden himself to men. He loved to
be in love and with a woman. I think he came closer to leveling with them than
with anybody.” Bogart married four women during his fifty-seven years, each
of them an actress: Helen Mencken (1926), Mary Phillips (1928), the late Mayo
Methot(i938), and in 19454 Lauren Bacall. “1 think once a person was out, they
were really out,” said Truman Capote, discussing the divorces. “He had emo¬
tional attachments.”
The Bogart-Methot marriage was a stormy one. “Their neighbors were lulled
to sleep,” Dorothy Parker once said, “by the sounds of breaking china and crash¬
ing glass.’’Johnson recalled that Methot once had Bogart followed. “She was very
jealous and positive that he was playing around. But Bogie never had a weak¬
ness for dames. The only weakness he ever had was for a drink and a talk.” John¬
son smiled. “Bogie soon found out a guy was tailing him, and he called up the
fellow’s agency. ‘Hello, this is Humphrey Bogart,’ he said. ‘You got a man on
my tail. Would you check with him and find out where I am. ’ ”
The first time Bogart met Betty Bacall was coming out of director Howard
Hawks’s office. She had made a test for Hawks, who had discovered her and first
teamed the couple in To Have and Have Not (1945). “I saw your test,” Bogart said
to her. “We’re gonna have a lotta fun together.” It was with Bacall that he had
his only children, a boy named Steve, which is what she called Bogart in that
first movie, and a girl named Leslie Howard, after the actor who had insisted
that Bogart be cast in the film version of The Petrified Forest (1936), the movie
that really began his picture career. “He missed her when they were apart,”
Capote said. “He loved her. He used to talk a terrific line, but he was monoga¬
mous. Although that isn’t entirely true—he fell in love with Bacall while he was
still married to Mayo.”
Peter Bogdanovich
97
Bogart put it this way: “I’m a one-woman man and I always have been. I guess
I’m old-fashioned. Maybe that’s why I like old-fashioned women, the kind who
stay in the house playing Roamin’ in the Gloomin’. They make a man think he’s a
man and they’re glad of it.” The stories go that Bogart was a heavy drinker, but
Johnson thinks otherwise. “I don’t think Bogie drank as much as he pretended
to,” he said. “Many’s a time I was with him, the doorbell would ring, and he’d
pick up his glass just to go answer the door. He couldn’t have been as good at
his job if he drank as much as he was supposed to have.”
But Bogart did drink. “I think the world is three drinks behind,” he used to
say, “and it’s high time it caught up.” On one occasion he and a friend bought
two enormous stuffed panda bears and took them as their dates to El Morocco.
They sat them in chairs at a table for four and when an ambitious young lady
came over and touched Bogart’s bear, he shoved her away. “I’m a happily mar¬
ried man,” he said, “and don’t touch my panda.” The woman brought assault
charges against him, and when asked if he was drunk at four o’clock in the morn¬
ing, he replied, “Sure, isn’t everybody?” (The judge ruled that since the panda
was Mr. Bogart’s personal property, he could defend it.)
But Bogart didn’t have to drink to start trouble. “He was an arrogant bastard,”
said Johnson, grinning. “It’s kinda funny, this cult and everything. When he was
alive, as many people hated him as loved him. I always thought of him as some¬
what like Scaramouche.” Johnson chuckled. “What was it? ‘Bora with the gift
of laughter and the sense that the world was mad. . . .’ He’d start a skirmish
and then sit back and watch the consequences. Of course, there was nearly al¬
ways something phony about the guy he was needling. Needle is the wrong
word—howitzer would be more like it. The other fellow could use deflating,
but it didn’t take all that artillery.”
The Holmby Hills Rat Pack, which Bogart initiated and which died with him,
sprang from this distaste for pretense. “What is a rat?” he once explained. “We
have no constitution, charter or bylaws, yet, but we know a rat when we see
one. There are very few rats in this town. You might say that rats are for stay¬
ing up late and drinking lots of booze. We’re against squares and being bored
and for lots of fun and being real rats, which very few people are, but if you’re
a real rat, boy! Our slogan is, ‘Never rat on a rat.’ A first principle is that we
don’t care who likes us as long as we like each other. We like each other very
much.”
John McClain tells of the yacht club Bogart belonged to and of the people
who rented the large house next door for a summer. They were the Earls and
they Dressed for Dinner. The members of the club (who were never invited)
used to peer over their fence, watching the lush festivities. McClain had been
invited to a Sunday dinner and had asked if he might bring Bogart along as they
would be together on his yacht over the weekend. As they docked, McClain re¬
minded Bogart to dress for the occasion and went off to get ready himself. Bo-
98 Movie Stars
gart went into the club for a drink or two. “After a while,” McClain recalled,
“Bogie announced to everyone in the club, ‘My dear friends, the Earls,’ he said,
‘are having an open house and they want you all to come.’ And into the Earl
house comes Bogie followed by about thirty people, all wearing shorts and sport
shirts and sneakers.” McClain laughed. “It was pretty funny, actually, but I was
furious at the time.”
“He could be very wrong too,” said Benchley. “One time at ‘ 2 1 ’ I was stand¬
ing at the bar with a couple of friends and Bogie got up from his table and came
over. ‘Are you a homosexual?’ he said to one of them, just like that. The fellow
looked rather taken aback and said he didn’t see that it was any of his business.
‘Well are you?’ said Bogie. ‘Come on, we got a bet going at the table.’ The fel¬
low said, ‘Since you ask, no.’ I think Bogie could feel he’d been wrong and he
turned to the other guy with us and asked him if he was a homosexual. The guy
said no. He asked me and I said no and then he said, ‘Well, I am,’ and kinda
minced away. He knew he’d been wrong.”
A few weeks after Bogart’s death, Peter Ustinov said, in a speech: “Humphrey
Bogart was an exceptional character in a sphere where characters are not usu¬
ally exceptional. To a visitor hot from the cold shores of England, he would put
on an exaggerated Oxford accent and discuss the future of the ‘British Empah’
as though he wrongheadedly cared for nothing else in the wide world. His aim
was to shake the newcomer out of his assumed complacency by insults which
were as shrewdly observed as they were malicious. . . . The way into his heart
was an immediate counterattack in a broad American accent, during which one
assumed a complicity between him and his hete noire, Senator McCarthy, in
some dark scheme. ... It was in the character of the man that he smiled with
real pleasure only when he had been amply repaid in kind.”
Capote would go along with that: “The turning point in our friendship—the
beginning really—was during Beat the Devil (19 J4). Bogie and John Huston and
some others, they were playing that game—you know the one, what d’ya call
it—you take each other’s hand across a table and try to push the other’s arm
down. Well, it just happens that I’ve very good at that game. So, anyway, Bogie
called over, ‘Hey, Caposy.’ That’s what he called me, ‘Caposy.’ He said,
‘C’mon, Caposy, let’s see you try this.’ And I went over and I pushed his arm
down. Well, he looked at me. ... He had such a suspicious mind, he was sure
that Huston had cut off my head and sewed it onto someone else’s body. ‘Let’s
see you do that again,’ he said. And again I pushed his arm down. So he said once
more, and I said I would only if we bet a hundred dollars, which we did. I won
again and he paid me, but then he came over and he started sort of semi-wrestling
with me. It was something they did. He was crushing me and I said, ‘Cut that
owat,’ and he said, ‘Cut that owat.’ I said. ‘Well, do,’ and he said, ‘Why?’ I said,
‘Because you’re hurting me.’ But he kept right on squeezing, so I got my leg
Peter Bogdanovich
99
around behind him and pushed and over he went. He was flat on his can look¬
ing up at me. And from then on we were very good friends.”
“Bogie’s needling tactics were quite calculated,” Johnson explained. “1 had
lunch with him and Betty at Romanoff’s one time and she was giving him hell
about some row at a party. He’d provoked it, of course. ‘Someday somebody’s
gonna belt you,' she said, and he said, ‘No, that’s the art of it—taking things up
to that point and then escaping. ’ ”
In 1947, Bogart led a march to Washington to protest the investigations of the
Un-American Activities Committee. Some people labeled him a pinko. He
didn’t like that. ‘I am an American,” he said. Bogart’s political freethinking was
considered dangerous in Hollywood. In 1952, however, he campaigned most
actively for Stevenson for President. “He never seemed to give a damn what peo¬
ple thought or said,” Mr. Stevenson recalled. “And it was quite perilous in those
days to be a Democrat, especially one partisan to me. He was disdainful about
anybody trying to muscle about in a free country.”
“He wasn’t an extremist in anything,” said Miss Bacall, “except telling the
truth. You had to admire Bogie. He always said what he thought. ‘Goddammit,’
he used to say, ‘if you don’t want to hear the truth, don’t ask me.’ ”
“That’s true,” Johnson agreed. “Everything he did was honest. He used to say,
‘What’s everybody whispering about? I’ve got cancer!’ He’d say, ‘For Christ’s
sake, it’s not a venereal disease.’ ”
Bogart also said that the only point in making money is “so you can tell some
big shot to go to hell.” And: “I have politeness and manners. I was brought up
that way. But in this goldfish-bowl life, it is sometimes hard to use them.”
His widow thinks it was more than just good manners Bogart had. Finally,
she’ll tell you, “He was an old-fashioned man, a great romantic. And very emo¬
tional. He would cry when a dog died. You should have seen him at our wed¬
ding, tears streaming down his face. He told me that he started thinking about
the meaning of the words. He was tough about life and totally uncompromis¬
ing, but I remember he went to see Steve at nursery school and when he saw
him sitting at his little desk, he cried.”
Alistair Cooke met the Bogarts on the Stevenson campaign train and he re¬
membered sitting with them one afternoon and saying that, of course, Steven¬
son wouldn’t win. “ ‘What!’ said Bogie, astounded. ‘Not a prayer, I’m afraid,’
I said. ‘Why you son of a bitch,’ Betty said, ‘that’s a fine thing to say.' ‘Look,’
I said, ‘I’m a reporter. You’re the lieutenants. ’ We bet ten dollars on it and when
Stevenson lost he paid it to me. But he didn’t really think I’d take it. You know
what he said? ‘It’s a hell of a guy who bets against his own principles.’ ”
Cooke commented on this Bogart trait in an article he wrote for The Atlantic
I oo
Movie Scars
Monthly (May, 1947). “A touchy man who found the world more corrupt than
he had hoped ... he invented the Bogart character and imposed it on a world
impatient of men more obviously good. And it fitted his deceptive purpose like
a glove. . . . From all . . . he was determined to keep his secret: the rather
shameful secret, in the realistic world we inhabit, of being a gallant man and an
idealist.”
Other friends detected a similar quality in Bogart. Mankiewicz called it, “A
sadness about the human condition. He had a kind of eighteenth-century, Alexan¬
der Pope nature. I think he would have made a superb Gatsby. His life reflected
Gatsby’s sense of being an outsider.” Stevenson found “a wistful note in him, as
there often is in thinking people. He was much more profound than one might
think.” And Capote called him lost. “It was his outstanding single characteris¬
tic—that something almost pathetic. Not that he would ever ask for sympathy,
far from it. It just always seemed to me as though he were permanently lonely.
It gave him a rather poetic quality, don’t you think?”
That secret inner world of Humphrey Bogart was reflected in his passion for
sailing and his love for the Santana, his boat, on which he went off whenever he
could, accompanied by a few friends. They used to drink Drambuies and play
dominoes or just sail. He had learned early about the sea, having left school (at
their request) at seventeen and joined the Navy. It was on the troopship Leviathan
that he received the injury that permanently scarred his upper lip. “Sailing. That
was the part of him no one could get at,” Capote said. “It wasn’t anything ma¬
terialistic. It was some kind of inner soul, an almost mystical hideaway.”
If the Motion Picture Herald’s annual Fame Poll of the Top Ten movie stars can
be trusted, it appears that Bogart’s peak years of popularity were 1943—1949,
during and just after World War II. Cooke explained it this way: “He was . . .
a romantic hero inconceivable in any time but ours. . . . When Hitler was act¬
ing out scripts more brutal and obscene than anything dreamed of by Chicago’s
North Side or the Warner Brothers, Bogart was the only possible antagonist likely
to outwit him and survive. What was needed was no Ronald Colman, Leslie
Howard or other knight of the boudoir, but a conniver as subtle as Goebbels.
Bogart was the very tough gent required, and to his glory he was always, in the
end, on our side.”
He didn’t get his Oscar, however, until 1952 (for The African Queen), and
popped up on the top ten again in 1955, a little more than a year before he
died. Betty Comden: “I don’t think this cult is anything new. ...” Adolph
Green: “No. . . ,”Comden:“Bogartneverstoppedbeingpopular. . . .’’Green:
“There are so few originals around. . . .’’Comden: “Bogart’s style had an innate
sophistication. . . .” Green: “He was less an actor . . .”, Comden: “. . . than a
Peter Bogdanovich
i o i
personality.” Bogart agreed. “Sure 1 am. It took fifteen years to make us per¬
sonalities. Gable and Cooper can do anything in a picture, and people would
say, ‘Oh, that’s just good old Clark.’ ”
“His great basic quality,” said Ustinov, “was a splendid roughness. Even when
perfectly groomed, I felt I could have lit a match on his jaw. . . . He knew his
job inside out, and yet it was impossible not to feel that his real soul was else¬
where, a mysterious searching instrument knocking at doors unknown even to
himself. ...”
Perhaps this is what Bogart ’ s admirers sense. “There was something about him
that came through in every part he played,” said Miss Bacall. “I think he’ll al¬
ways be fascinating—to this generation and every succeeding one. There was
something that made him able to be a man of his own and it showed through his
work. There was also a purity, which is amazing considering the parts he played.
Something solid too. I think as time goes by we all believe less and less. Here
was someone who believed in something.”
“Like all really great stars,” said director George Cukor, “he had a secret. You
never really know him altogether. He also had boldness of mind, freedom of
thought—a buccaneer. I think these young people haven’t seen him,” he went
on, trying to explain the cult. “They’re simply rediscovering him. After all, Bogie
had class.”
“The average college student would sooner identify with Bogart than, say,
Sinatra, don’t you think?” said Mankiewicz. “He had that rather intellectual dis¬
respect for authority. Also I don’t think anyone ever really believed that Bogart
was a gangster—that’s what fascinated people. Bogart never frightened them.”
“It’s angry youth,” Chester Morris said. “They’re cheering for the heavy
today. Everything must be nonconformist. They’d also like to do the kind of
things he did. He was a forerunner of James Bond.” Benchley: “He’s a hero with¬
out being a pretty boy.”
“Could it be anything as simple as sex appeal?” Capote wondered. “He had
an image of sophisticated virility and he projected it remarkably well. And with
such humor. At last, he had such style that it doesn’t wither, it doesn’t age, it
doesn’t date. Like Billie Holiday.”
“I think Robin Hood has always been attractive,” said Adlai Stevenson.
Before the adulation, there must be something to adulate. And this must be cre¬
ated. “If a face like Ingrid Bergman’s looks at you as though you’re adorable,”
Bogart once said, “everyone does. You don’t have to act very much.” The late
Raymond Chandler thought otherwise: “All Bogart has to do to dominate a scene
is to enter it.” Evidently it wasn’t always that way. In 1922, playing one of his
first stage roles, he was reviewed by Alexander Woollcott: “His performance
I o 2
Movie Stars
could be mercifully described as inadequate.” But two years later, of another
performance, Woollcott again: “Mr. Bogart is a young actor whose last ap¬
pearance was recorded by your correspondent in words so disparaging that it is
surprising to find him still acting. Those words are hereby eaten.” It would fig¬
ure that Bogart often used to quote the first review but never the second.
“ ‘Why, I’m aNational Institution,’ he used to say,” Capote recalled. “He was
very proud of his success and fame. But he was most serious about his acting.
He thought of it as a profession, one that he was curious about, knew something
about. After all, it was almost the sum total of his life. In the end, Bogart really
was an artist. And a very selective one. All the gestures and expressions were
pruned down and pruned down. One time I watched The Maltese Falcon with him
and he sat there, muttering in that hoarse way, criticizing himself in the third
person. ‘Now he’s gonna come in,’ he’d say. ‘Then he’s gonna do this and that’s
where he does the wrong thing.’ I gathered during the silences that he liked it.
It was braggadocio through silence.”
Howard Hawks directed Bogart in his two most archetypal roles, as Harry
(Steve) Morgan in To Have and Have Not and Philip Marlow in The Big Sleep
(1946). “He was extremely easy to work with,” Hawks said. “Really underrated
as an actor. Without his help I couldn’t have done what I did with Bacall. Not
many actors would sit around and wait while a girl steals a scene. But he fell in
love with the girl and the girl with him, and that made it easy.”
Bogart used to say that an audience was always a little ahead of the actor. “If
a guy points a gun at you,” he explained, “the audience knows you’re afraid. You
don’t have to make faces. You just have to believe that you are the person
you’re playing and that what is happening is happening to you.”
Ustinov acted with Bogart once, in a comedy called We're No Angels (19 ss)-
“Bogart had an enormous presence,” he said, “and he carried the light of battle
in his eye. He wished to be matched, to be challenged, to be teased. I could see
a jocular and quarrelsome eye staring out of the character he was playing into
the character I was playing—rather as an experienced bullfighter might stare a
hotheaded bull into precipitate action.”
“When the heavy, full of crime and bitterness,” said Bogart, “grabs his wounds
and talks aboutdeath and taxes in a husky voice, the audience is his and his alone.”
This emotion, elicited so consciously from his movie audiences, ironically be¬
came a reality. His death was horribly, heartbreakingly in character. He died on
J anuary 14, 19 j 7, of a cancer of the esophagus, and it had taken well over a year
to kill him. “These days,” he said, “I just sit around and talk to my friends, the
people I like.” Which is what he did.
“I went to see him toward the end,” said Ambassador Stevenson. “He was very
Peter Bogdanovich
103
ill and very weak, but he made a most gallant effort to keep gay. He had an in¬
tolerance for weakness, an impatience with illness.”
“I went a few times,” Capote said. “Most of his friends went, some almost
every day, like Sinatra. Some were very loyal. He seemed to bring out the best
in them all. He looked so awful, so terribly thin. His eyes were huge and they
looked so frightened. They got bigger and bigger. It was real fear and yet there
was always that gay, brave self. He’d ha ve to be brought downstairs on the dumb¬
waiter and he’d sit and wait and wait for his Martini. He was only allowed one,
I think, or two. And that’s how we used to find him, smoking and sipping that
Martini.”
During that time, his wife rarely left the house, though her friends and even
Bogart urged her to go out more often. When someone asked why she had only
been out six or seven times in ten months, Bogart replied: “She’s my wife and
my nurse. So she stays home. Maybe that’s the way you tell the ladies from the
broads in this town.”
“He went through the worst and most agonizing pain any human can take,”
said Dr. Maynard Brandsma. “I knew this and when I’d see him I’d ask, ‘How
is it?’ Bogie would always answer simply, ‘Pretty rough.’ He never complained
and he never whimpered. I knew he was dying and during the last weeks I knew
he knew it too.”
“I saw him twenty-three days before he died,” said Cukor. “He couldn’t
come downstairs anymore and he was heavily sedated. He kept closing his eyes.
Still he’d be telling jokes and asking to hear the gossip. But his voice was the
wonder. That marvelous voice. It was absolutely alive. It was the last thing that
died.”
His death came in the early morning and that day the papers carried the news
to the world. Most of the reports were similar. Quite a few of them told it this
way: “Usually he kissed his wife Lauren Bacall and said, ‘Good night.’ But ac¬
cording to Dr. Michael Flynn, this time he put his hand on her arm and mur¬
mured in his familiar brusque fashion, ‘Good-bye, kid.’ ”
Whether it really happened that way or not is beside the point. Bogart the
man and Bogart the hero had merged until now one couldn’t tell the difference
between the two, if indeed there ever had been any. He had walked through
seventy-five movie nights for his public and it was too late now to change the
image, too late to alter a legend that had really just begun.
David Thomson
David Thomson is a San Francisco—based Englishman whose Biographical Dictionary
of Film is one of the key reference works: quirky, personal, opinionated, infuriating, and
quite often right on the money. He has written a lot of fiction incorporating the real-life
personas of movie stars, and in Suspects he does the reverse: He takesfamous movie char¬
acters, writes as if they were real people, and places them in the times and experiences he
imagines they would have encountered. He is of course committing a folly forbidden by
serious criticism, which teaches us that as characters are fictional, they have no reality
other than that invented by their creators. But because many movie characters do live on
in our imaginations, it is seductive to read their "real’' stories.
from Suspects
Norma Desmond
Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, 2950,
directed by Billy Wilder
You can look at movie magazines from the early 1920s, amazed at the faces of
beautiful young actresses, stars then, but so little known now that their eupho¬
nious names sound concocted—Barbara La Marr, Lupe Velez, Agnes Ayres,
Alexandra Laguna, Leatrice Joy, Norma Desmond, and so on. All brunettes, with
black lips, curls stuck on their brows and eyes like bulletholes: they seem to cher¬
ish the pain of sexual exploitation by men. There is implacability in the faces,
like a ship’s figurehead battling into the elements. It comes from signaling feel¬
ings; those silent women are stranded in the impossibility of utterance. A few
years later, after sound, women’s faces softened. The loveliness grew quiet and
intriguing. Words were put out, like bait on the threshold of their being. They
smiled, where silent faces had had trumpeting frowns.
David Thomson
IOJ
It must have been maddening. Not many of them lasted more than a few years;
the business was exhausting, and that kind of beauty is our endless American re¬
source . It was only will that made any of them famous, or put forbidding strength
in their faces. Somehow, they all seemed overdone; no matter how hard they
tried, they must have known the shame of feeling coarse or clumsy. You can
imagine them killing even, at the end of their tether, laughing if the gun went
off and there was only a small puff of light to show explosion. But the man aimed
at was staggering, stupefied, his hands clutched to the hole where life was leak¬
ing out. The ladies could make you believe.
So many of their names were false. Norma Desmond was born May Svens-
son in Milwaukee in 1899. She was the daughter of Swedish immigrants, the
youngest of five children. Years later, some version of Miss Desmond told Pho¬
toplay: “I had picked a good time and place to be bom. The automobile was not
much older than I was, so there weren’t many of them. Trolleys and wagons
were pulled by horses, and none of them went too fast. It was a safe, clean time.
When you were thirsty in the summer, your mother made a pitcher of lemon¬
ade. And everyone did the family wash on Monday and hung it out in the fresh
air to dry.”
Charming, don’t you think? But actresses are in love with such crystal-clear
happiness. May Svensson’s early life was not a pitcher of homemade lemonade
or the bouquet of fresh laundry. Instead, she was taken by her father on his tours
of Wisconsin and Minnesota, selling Bibles and being driven by penury into in¬
creasingly reckless confidence tricks in which the daughter was often the decoy.
They lived in cheap hotels, or on the run: there were a few nights in town jails,
the child in a cot next to the sheriff’s desk waiting for her father to be released.
And so it was, in 1911, that May saw her father shot down by a man named
Gregson, the victim of a small enough fraud, a God-fearing but choleric man
who had pursued Svensson for seven months. May was holding her father’s hand,
and talking to him, coming out of a diner in Kenosha, when a pistol blast met
them. She felt the pressure in the air and was dragged sideways by her father’s
fall, his dead grip on her growing tighter.
She had her picture in the Chicago papers, wide-eyed, floridly becurled and
stricken. A manager at the Essanay studios noticed it, and his flabby head was
so touched by her plight that he saw a way of making money. He found her and
devised a series of one-reelers about a waif, “Sweedie” she was called, an orphan
and an outcast who got into sentimental scrapes and comic adventures. The films
were poorly made, but the child bloomed in them. The camera breathed in time
with the rising beat of puberty; in a year of those short movies she became an
object of furtive lust, her picture pinned in lockers. The movies learned early
how to fashion an arousing innocence that inspires its own spoiling.
“Norma Desmond,” as Essanay had called her, was married at fifteen to Wal¬
lace Beery, twice her age and the robust exponent of his own ugliness. It was
Movie Stars
i 06
like a virgin princess being taken by a barbarian. The public was thrilled with
alarm. In reality, Norma scolded him incessantly, until he left her with the
beach house, all but one of their cars and the vases filled with his cash. This was
1917-
She had an extraordinary career in silent pictures, earning as much as $ i £,000
a week, to say nothing of bonuses. She worked for Marshall Neilan, Cecil B. De
Mille, Harry D’Abbadie D’Arrast and Allan Dwan. Her burning gaze played on
audiences like the light of the screen. The industry romanticized her and her “en¬
chanted” life. Perhaps she believed those stories herself—her image was over¬
powering. She had gone so swiftly from the sordid to the luxurious, from being
abused to being worshipped. She was a Cinderella who became a tyrant queen,
without time to clean the coal dust from her fingernails. An aura of transfor¬
mation surrounded her. There was a famous portrait of her face staring through
an embroidered veil, a celebration of beauty as a fatal delusion. She met the ty¬
coon Noah Cross and he mounted a play with her as Salome, discarding hun¬
dreds of veils, while he sat on a stool in the wings to see her body emerge through
the misty gauze.
Perhaps her conviction was too intense for the naturalism of sound pictures?
Or were her demands for money more than the industry could endure? Princess
of the Micks, her film for Max von Mayerling, her husband, was a disaster in which
she sank one million dollars of her own money. And so she went to France, mar¬
rying a marquis whose name she never learned to spell. She made a film there,
Une Jeune Fille de campagne, about Charlotte Corday, in which the character will
not speak—to protect her excessive expressiveness or the actress’s lack of
French.
While in Europe, she married the German Baron von Rauffenstein. Mayer¬
ling had never really been given up during these other marriages. He simply went
from being husband to personal manager; it meant he dressed earlier in the day.
There was consternation in the press, but the three figures handled the “menage”
without dismay. Moreover, in 1931—32, Norma Desmond had an affair with
Serge Alexandre, also known as Stavisky. To this day there is a rumor in France
that she had a child by the swindler, a daughter, who was passed on to a simple
farming couple on the estate of Baron Raoul, a friend of Alexandre’s. (An un¬
expectedly striking face in an out-of-the-way place will often inspire such fan¬
cies. But suppose real foundlings are not especially pretty, what then?)
In 1934, she returned to the mansion on Sunset Boulevard (bought for her
by Noah Cross), where she would remain until her removal, at the hands of the
police, in 1950. Mayerling came back to America in 1939 and became her but¬
ler. Norma Desmond slipped from glory to oblivion, unaware in her retreat of
any change in her power or her looks. She was so removed from public contact
now, she may have thought herself divine.
David Thomson
°7
She had only a monkey as an intimate until Joe Gillis strayed into her life. He
seemed to offer the means of a comeback, but he was also a lover and a slave.
When he thought to leave her, she shot him, in the belly, as yet unaware that
her own body nurtured his child. In the asylum hospital, she never deigned to
notice her swelling or the birth of the boy. She was officially insane, lecturing
the other inmates and shooting them with imaginary guns when they ignored
her. She died in 1959, still firing.
Richard Blaine
Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, 1942, directed by Michael Curtiz
We used to tell stories about Rick. He was only ten or so years older than this
writer, but can’t you remember the luster that ten years has for a kid? Grow¬
ing up near Omaha, I used to see him around the city. He seemed tall and un¬
shaven, a wild fellow. But I find now that he never grew above five feet eight.
In the few pictures I have of him later in life he seems to be making an effort to
look dapper and impressive. In those early days, you heard stories about Rick
“borrowing” someone’s car for a night drive and outrunning the cops. He had
girls hanging around him a lot of the time. He looked bored with them, but he’d
let them kiss him sometimes. It was a privilege to catch the dime he tossed
through the sunlight and hear the “Hey, kid, get me a Nehi, will you?” I did that
twice, and the second time he grinned at me. I thought I felt the sun beaming.
Yet I saw Rick’s crooked teeth when his mouth bared.
He had been born in Omaha in 1900, the son of a pharmacist. (Later, I know,
he said he was younger, and from big tough New York; forgive him—no one
in this book has managed without a few lies.) If I remember him as a kid out of
school, the figure in the best adventures, older-seeming than his peers, a boy’s
man, it wasn’t that he neglected his studies. It surprised me, on going into it,
that his grades were steady and high. He had an A— average, and he kept on work¬
ing, trying to be better. The more I look at his record now, the more clearly I
see a short, diligent man, whose amiability and natural bravery must have fur¬
nished his legend. Or was the legend just something I and others like me re¬
quired? Was he only the conscientious boy who had to act up to it? When you
think about how he turned out, you have to wonder whether his disillusion had
something to do with that early feeling of inadequacy. Maybe I helped urge hero¬
ism on him and it became his curse. But was I supposed to look at the world and
not use my imagination?
Richard Blaine went to Lincoln, to the university, in 1918. He majored in
history, and he was especially interested in economics. He was one of the group
108 Movie Stars
that owed so much to Professor Wilson Keyes, though he and Keyes had heated
arguments in class. Rick was already affected by radical ideas, and Keyes was a
tough conservative who could never see past the sacrifices imposed in Russia in
the name of communism. But that’s how Rick grew in our eyes. He was quar¬
terback on the football team his junior and senior years—which was a big thing
in Nebraska then and now. But he had a reputation, too, as a red-hot debater
and a guy who tried to read Lenin in Russian.
All the same, in those days he still helped out in his dad’s pharmacy on Ames.
He was generally ready to do a good turn for the old folks. He was best friends
with Ralph Hunt, and he was godfather to Ralph’s second daughter, Laura, born
in 1920. Here’s a picture of him outside the church, holding the baby. And
Ralph’s next to him, holding Mary Frances’s hand. She’s gazing up at her younger
sister with that fretful look on her face. So young, so worried. Rick looks as proud
as can be.
It surprised everyone when he went to Detroit to work in the Ford factory.
Rick could have been in management, I’m sure, but he stayed on the assembly
line because he said he wanted to get to know the working man. He was there
f or three years, and he came back a lot harder and a sight less cheerful.
He lived in a room in Omaha then, full of books and Mitzi Glass. They had
gone together a little at Lincoln, and she was the best-known radical in town.
Because of her great red hair, and her severe looks, people used to call her “Red
Mitzi.” Now, I’m sure there were some who hated what she believed in, or
were afraid of it, but I think a lot of people were fond of her really. Rick loved
her. They never got married because they said it was an irrelevance, and that
made for a gulf between Rick and Ralph. But Omaha could take him then, with¬
out spitting him out. There was never any of the outrage that got talked up
later.
Anyway, in those years, Mitzi was organizing farm labor and Rick helped her;
he was writing his novel about the automobile industry— Drums of Steel —and
he was drinking. No one ever denied that. I know some people who’d admired
him once gave up on him. They called him a layabout and a lush, and no one
much liked his book: it’s awkward and high-minded, but the stuff in the facto¬
ries is good, Ithink. It was what happened to Mitzi that moved Rick on. In 1930,
there was a strike up near Bassett. Strikebreakers came in and Mitzi got hit on
the head with a fence post. It took her five months to die but she never regained
consciousness. The word was that Rick went into the hospital one night and
smothered her. If so, it was merciful.
He went out to California then and he did a lot of organizing with fruit work¬
ers. That was hard. The labor was poor, Spanish most of it, and itinerant, and
the bosses were rough on union men. Rick stuck to it and that’s the period when
he joined the Party. But he got pneumonia in ’thirty-three, a bad case. He was
David Thomson
i 09
always weaker afterward, and drinking still. Then in 193 j he went on a trip to
Moscow. It was for students mainly, but Rick managed to go on it and he was
there two months. From all I can gather, he came back redder than ever. But
he returned by way of Africa, having gone on from Moscow to Abyssinia on some
sort of mission.
It was no surprise in 1936 that he started speaking for Spain and the Repub¬
lic and early the following year he was over there with the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade. He fought all through the war, at Madrid and then in Barcelona. He
was a captain, and his health was finally shot by the experience. Worse than that,
I think, he was disenchanted. That war, he thought, could have been won. He
despaired not so much at the free countries staying neutral, but at the dissen¬
sion in Spain itself among the various branches of the anarchists and the Com¬
munists. In addition, he didn’t like anything he heard about the trials going on
in Moscow. By the end of the war, he had given up the Party and he was look¬
ing for a different life.
Rick was in Paris for a time doing not much, except trading on the black mar¬
ket and carrying on with lisa Lund. He was regarded as a cynic by then. The
drinking was constant, and not even Sam, a guy who had come out of Spain with
him, could keep him cheerful. The affair with lisa was hopeless; she had all these
causes, perhaps Rick used her to remind himself of all he’d lost. He wanted it
to fail, he was dependent now on self-pity. So when the Germans came in, Rick
got out. As I heard it from Sam, Rick was going anyway but later he persuaded
himself that lisa had let him down.
He got to Casablanca and he opened the Cafe Americain, where anything was
possible. You could buy or sell whatever you wanted—jewels, drugs, papers,
lives—it was a rat-race of a market. There were people of all nationalities and
persuasions. The war was held down by money, greed and fear. It was an ugly
place, and the movie they made romanticized it and Rick. He was as vicious as
he had to be by then, just taking his cut on whatever happened, OK-ing every
kind of deal and arrangement.
The big new thing in his life was Louis Renault (1891 — 1964), the head of the
Vichy police in Casablanca. Apparently he took one long look at Rick and knew
he was homosexual underneath all the brooding and the sneers about women.
He could see Rick was dying too, and he was decent enough to do what he could
for him. After Strasser was killed and the weird but wonderful Victor Laszlo got
away, Rick and Louis slipped off into the fog together. They went south, to Mar¬
rakech, and they lived there after the war, until Rick died in 1949 .1 can see him
sitting out in the sun, slipping a coin in an Arab boy’s hand in return for one of
those sweet cordials. Louis took the best care of him, and at the very end they
were laughing together over reports of the red scare in America.
I I o
Movie Stars
Nicholas Ray
I first saw Nicholas Kay during the tumultuous days of the 1968 Chicago Democratic
Convention. A tall, gaunt man with unruly hair and an eye patch, he came striding out
of a crowd of demonstrating students. He was living in a shabby apartment in Old Town
and preparing a movie about what he saw as a developing revolutionary situation in Amer¬
ica; drinking through a long night, he explained how he wanted to raise money to shoot
a film in the streets as "the kids’’ attacked the establishment. (Oddly, Haskell Wexler’s
Medium Cool wasfilming in Chicago with much the same vision at about the same time.)
This was the same Nicholas Kay who had made some of the great noir classics (They Live
by Night, In a Lonely Place), and whose Rebel without a Cause ( 1 955) d finedJames
Dean and added a phrase to the language. In his memoir, I Was Interrupted, Kay re¬
membered his Hollywood days with a frankness assisted by his knowledge that he would
never work there again. Here he remembers Dean with the tenderness of a lover—or a
father.
James Dean
First there was the revolver.
Jimmy kept a Colt .4 j in his dressing room, where he also slept. He had come
back to Hollywood at the age of 2 2 for East of Eden, but everything that he did
suggested he had no intention of belonging to the place. He had come to work;
but he would remain himself. He found in the Warners studio a sanctuary of
steel and concrete. At night he could be alone in this closed, empty kingdom.
Perhaps the revolver was a symbol, of self-protection, of warning to others.
He rode a motorcycle. He dressed casually, untidily, which invariably was
interpreted as a gesture of revolt. Not entirely true. For one thing, it saved time,
and Jim detested waste. It also saved money. (This is a simple consideration,
often ignored. Most young actors are poor: T-shirt and jeans for work, later to
Nicholas Kay
i i i
become a mannerism, was originally a quick and comfortable way to cut down
the laundry bill.) Some days he would forego shaving if there was something
more important to do. And what’s wrong with that?
Like the revolver these habits were self-protective. Riding a motorcycle, he
traveled by himself. Sleeping in a studio dressing room, he had complete soli¬
tude. He could leave, but nobody else could come in. He shied away from man¬
ners and social convention because they suggested disguise. He wanted his self
to be naked. “Being a nice guy,” he once said, “is detrimental to actors. When I
first came to Hollywood, everyone was nice to me, everyone thought I was a
nice guy. I went to the commissary to eat, and people were friendly, and I
thought it was wonderful. But I decided not to continue to be a nice guy. Then
people would have to respect me for my work.”
Soon after shooting on East of Eden was finished, h e went t o his dressing room
and found the gun had disappeared. He was furious, but this was only the be¬
ginning. A few days later the studio authorities told him he could no longer sleep
in the dressing room. (It came close to violating safety regulations, and Warn¬
ers hadhad a couple of disastrous fires.) He refused to believe them until he was
refused admittance at the gate that night.
There were name and number plates on each office door at Warners. Next
morning Jimmy took them all down, changed some around, and hung others
from ceilings and fountains, causing widespread confusion. Then he rode away
on his motorcycle, vowing never to make a film there again.
Cat-like he had prowled around and found his own preferred comer. Then
it was forbidden him. A wound to the pride of a cat is serious. Ask any of us
cats.
Not long after I had written the first outline of Rebel, Kazan invited me to see
a rough cut of East of Eden in the music room at Warners. The composer,
Leonard Rosenman, was there, improvising at the piano. And Jimmy was there,
aloof and solitary; we hardly exchanged a word. That he had talent was obvi¬
ous, but I respected Kazan’s skills too much to give full marks to any actor who
worked with him.
My office at Warners adjoined Kazan’s. One day Jimmy dropped by. He asked
me what I was working on. I told him the idea and approach. He seemed war¬
ily interested, but didn’t say very much. A day or two later he brought in a tough,
dark-haired young man named Perry Lopez, whom he had met in New York.
He told me that Perry came from the Lexington Avenue district: “You should
talk to him,” he said.
A few more such encounters and I decided to get Dean to play Jim Stark.
But he had to decide, too. It was not a simple question of whether or not he
liked the part. Neither he nor Warners were sure he would ever work there
again. And after the smell of success began to surround East of Eden, agents and
11 1
Movie Stars
well-wishers were eager to advise him. It would be foolish, they told him, to
appear in any film not based on a best-seller, not adapted by a $ 3,000-a-week
writer, and not directed by Elia Kazan, George Stevens, John Huston, or William
Wyler. He was not the kind of person to take such advice very seriously, but
intensely self-aware as he was, he could not fail to be troubled by “success.” If
there were aspects of it he enjoyed, it also played on his doubts.
One evening we had a long passionate discussion with Shelley Winters about
acting and show business. “I better know how to take care of myself,” he said.
This attitude lay behind his choice of work. He had quarreled with Kazan dur¬
ing East of Eden, but retained a respect for him, and would have been flattered
to work for him again.
There were probably few other directors with whom Jimmy could have
worked. To work with Jimmy meant exploring his nature; without this his
powers of expression were frozen. He wanted to make films in which he could
personally believe, but it was never easy for him. Between belief and action lay
the obstacle of his own deep, obscure uncertainty. Disappointed, unsatisfied,
he was the child who skulks off to his private comer and refuses to speak. Eager
and hopeful, he was the child exhilarated with new pleasure, wanting more,
wanting everything, and often unconsciously subtle in his pursuit of it.
Late one evening he arrived at my house with Jack Simmons, at that time an
unemployed actor, and Vampira, the television personality. (Jack was to become
a close friend of Jim’s and appear with him in a TV play. Jimmy often extended
sudden affection to lonely and struggling people, several of whom he’d adopt.
He had few permanent relationships, so his companion of the moment was most
likely to be an adoption of the moment, or a new object of curiosity. He told
me later he had wanted to meet Vampira because he was studying magic. Was
she really possessed by satanic forces, as her TV program suggested? “She didn’t
know anything!” he exclaimed sadly.) On entering the room he turned a back
somersault, then from the floor looked keenly at me.
“Are you middle-aged?”
I admitted it.
“Did you live in a bungalow on Sunset Boulevard, by the old Clover Club?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Was there a fire there in the middle of the night?”
“Yes.”
“Did you carry a boxer puppy out of the house in your bare feet across the
street and cut your feet?”
I had.
He seemed to approve. He had heard the story from Vampira and came to
find out if it were true.
On Sunday afternoons I used to invite a few people in to play music, sing,
Nicholas Kay
i 13
and talk. Jimmy always came to these gatherings and enjoyed them. We were
exploring on both sides. Was he going to like my friends? Both of us had to know.
One afternoon he stayed on after the others had gone. Clifford Odets came
by, and I introduced them. Jimmy was peculiarly silent and retreated to a cor¬
ner. I went out to the kitchen to mix some drinks. Clifford later told me what
had happened:
There had been a long silence. The distance of the room lay between them.
At last, in a grave voice, Jimmy spoke:
“I’m a sonofabitch.”
Clifford asked why.
“Well,”he explained, “here I am, you know, in this room. With you. It’s fan¬
tastic. Like meeting Ibsen or Shaw.”
Clifford remembered this as one of the most flattering remarks ever so sin¬
cerely addressed to him.
Jimmy approached all human beings with the same urgent, probing curiosity:
“Here I am. Here are you. ” At encountering a new presence, invisible antennae
seemed to reach out, grow tense, transmit a series of impressions.
Sometimes there’d be an extraordinary, unbearable tenderness. Michael and
Connie Bessie, a couple I’d known for many years, arrived one day from New
York. After I’d introduced them to Jimmy, Connie sat down on the couch. With¬
out thinking she picked up the cushion beside her and cradled it in her lap.
Jimmy watched and, after a moment, very intent and quiet, he asked her,
“Can’t you have a child of your own?”
Connie was dumbstruck and left the room. I went after her. We had once
wanted to marry. She and her husband had just adopted a baby.
Just before Christmas I went to New York to interview actors. Jimmy was
already there, and I visited his apartment, for there were things I had to know,
too. It was on the fifth floor of an old 68 th Street building without an elevator.
A fairly large furnished room with two porthole windows, a studio couch, a table,
some unmatching chairs and stools. On the walls, a bullfighting poster, capes,
and horns. Everywhere piles of books and records, some neatly stacked, some
spilling over. A door led to the kitchen and bath, another to a flight upstairs to
the roof. It was evening. The only light came from the scrap wood and fruit boxes
burning in the fireplace.
He played record after record on the phonograph. Where did he first hear
all those sounds? African tribal music, Afro-Cuban songs and dances, classical
jazz, Jack Teagarten, Dave Brubeck, Haydn, Berlioz. Many of the books were
about bullfighting. I remember Matador and Death in the Afternoon.
I introduced Jimmy to my son Tony, a Plato of sorts, to see if they’d get along
114
Movie Stars
and to see him through the eyes ofhis own generation. Tony stayed in New York
and I went back to Hollywood. Later he told me he saw Jimmy several times,
mainly at parties at the 68 th Street apartment or in rooms of one of the half-
dozen young actors and actresses he made his most frequent companions. It was
always the same group, and no one ever wanted to go home. Jimmy played bongo
drums, while another guy danced calypso and imitations of Gene Kelly. Con¬
versation ranged from new plays and movies to (as dawn broke) Plato and Aris¬
totle. They read stories and plays, goingright through Twenty-Seven Wagon Loads
of Cotton.
Jimmy also went to more orthodox parties. These were larger, given by peo¬
ple he knew less well. But he didn’t like crowds, they made him insecure. Ig¬
noring the talk and games, he would find his own melancholy corner.
He swerved easily from morbidity to elation. The depression could lift as com¬
pletely and unexpectedly as it had settled in. Once it was cured by going to see
Jacques Tati in The Big Day. Unshaven, tousled, wrapped in a dyed black trench
coat, glasses on the end ofhis nose, Jim’s mood was dark as he entered the the¬
atre. But after ten minutes he was laughing so wildly, the nearby audience
complained. He ignored them, there was nothing else he could do, the spell of
delight had got him. Before the film was over he had to leave, which he did in
a series of leaps and hurdles through the aisle. Back on the street, he stopped at
a pastry shop. Then down the sidewalk, eclair in hand, with the Grouchian walk
and the inquiring, bulbous-eyed face, he turned into Tati’s postman.
Another sad, grey, rainy New York day he decided to buy an umbrella. Um¬
brellas were everywhere in the store, rack upon rack. But which one? Finally
he let Tony choose one for him, an ordinary three-dollar model. Jimmy seized
it as if it were the one he had been after his whole life. He played with it as a
child with a new toy, exploring all its movements, flipping it open, pulling it
shut, twirling it over his head. In the street as the rain poured down, suddenly
brilliant and exhilarated, he became Charlie Chaplin.
It seemed that anything interested him. His gift for mime was uncanny. A
friend wanted to audition for the Actor’s Studio, and Jimmy offered to do the
scene with him. They chose a fairy tale, a fight between a fox and the little prince.
Immediately and with a ferocious longing Jimmy concentrated on the fox, and
his imagination winged. He did not imitate; the stealth, the grace, the menace
of the animal seemed to enter his body. He became a human fox.
He became other people with obvious passion and relief. “If I were he,” he
would say—and bless him for that, for it was a great part ofhis magic as an actor.
It was the magic IF Stanislavsky had learned about from all the great actors he’d
interviewed. But Jim hadn’t learned it, not from Lee Strasberg, for chrissake.
Nobody learns it, and nobody can breathe it into another.
Like the fox he was wary and hard to catch. For many, a relationship with
Jimmy was complex, even obsessive. For him it was simple and probably much
Nicholas Ray
i
less important. He was intensely determined not to be loved or love. He could
be absorbed, fascinated, attracted by things new or beautiful, but he would never
surrender himself. There were girls convinced they were the only ones in his
life (often at the same time, there were so many people and things in his life at
the same time), when they were no more than occasions.
When he was poor and unknown in New York, he had reason to be grateful
to several people for food and companionship, yet this was not enough for him
to trust them. Returning to New York after East of Eden, he sometimes used his
success to be cruel.
A young photographer he had known quite well in the struggling days wanted
to buy a Rolliflex camera. He asked Jim to go halves with him: the price was
$2j. Jim was affronted: “Why should I get a second-hand camera with you
when I can get all the new stuff I want now.”
He complained of his companions: “They bum meals from me.” One day in
a restaurant he wondered out loud, “Where are my friends?” Four of his closest
ones were with him at the table, but before they could answer he abruptly got
up and walked out.
“I don’t want anything seventy-thirty,” he liked to say. “Fifty-fifty’s enough
for me.” He came back to this idea often.
Every day he threw himself upon the world like a starved animal after a scrap
of food. The intensity of his fears and desires could make the search arrogant,
egocentric, but behind it was such a desperate vulnerability that one could not
but be moved by it, even frightened. Probably when he was faithless or cruel,
he believed he was paying off an old score. The affection that he rejected was
affection that once had been his but had found no answer.
The night before I went back to Hollywood we had dinner together, as we
had done every night of my New Y ork stay. We ate at an Italian restaurant, and
Jim ordered the food with great ceremony, taking pride in his knowledge of ob¬
scure dishes. I felt he had come to trust me. And that he would like to do the
film, though if this were so, other difficulties would lie ahead, including the sit¬
uation with Wamers and the objections of his agents and others who were be¬
ginning to hitch their wagons to the new star. And though I knew what I wanted
in the story, I had only thirty pages of script.
I was mulling this over when he looked up at me. Something in his expres¬
sion suggested he was about to impart a special confidence. He was restless, more
so than usual.
“I got crabs,” he said. “What do I do?”
I took him to a drugstore and introduced him to Cuprex. Outside in the street,
we parted. He thanked me for the help, smiled, then said:
“I want to do your film, but don’t tell those bastards at Warners.”
Movie Stars
l i 6
I said I was glad, and that I wouldn’t tell Warners anything except that I
wanted him. We shook hands on it.
Francois Truffaut
More than most other directors, Francois Truffaut remained afilm student and critic even
after he began directing. It was the cinema, and particularly the guidance of the French
critic Andre Bazin, that rescued him from an adolescence that seemed headed for nothing
good, and as an adult he continued to devourfilms and write about them, even captur¬
ing Hitchcock for a book-length interview about all hisjilms. Truffaut’s Day for Night
was an autobiographicalfilm about a movie director, and in it the director has a dream
in which he recalls being a small boy and visiting the cinema in his town that was show¬
ing an Orson Wellesfilm, and reaching in through the locked gates to steal a poster. Here
he writes about Welles and James Dean, two of his great influences in the lpgos — Welles
because of his direction and Dean because he so greatly increased the emotional freedom
of actors on the screen f.He killed psychology the day he appeared on the set”).
from The Films of My Life
Orson Welles
Citizen Kane: The Fragile Giant
Though it was made in Hollywood in August—September 1940, and shown in
the United States during 1941, because of the war Citizen Kane didn’t make it
to France until six years later. When it opened in Paris in July 1946, it was a
great event for the film buffs of my generation. Since the Liberation we had been
discovering American movies and were busily abandoning the French filmmak¬
ers we had admired during the war. We were even more emphatic about our
disaffection with French actors and actresses as we rushed to the Americans. Out
Fra n f ois Tr uff a u t
i 17
with Pierre Fresnay, Jean Marais, Edwige Feuillere, Raimu, Arletty; long live
Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy,
Lauren Bacall, Gene Tierney, Ingrid Bergman, Joan Bennett, et al.
We excused our radical shift on the grounds that French movie magazines,
especially L’Reran Francois, were so devoted to corporate anti-Americanism that
we were profoundly irritated. During the Occupation, because German films
were so mediocre and English-language films were forbidden, the French movie
industry prospered, our films were snatched up, the theaters were usually full.
After the Liberation, the Blum-Byrnes accords authorized the release of a great
many American films in France and the box-office receipts of French films went
down. It was not unusual to see French stars and directors demonstrating in the
streets of Paris for a reduction in the number of American films allowed to be
imported.
Also, a taste for escaping one’s own milieu, a thirst for novelty, romanticism,
and also obviously a spirit of contrariness, but mostly a love of vitality, made us
love anything that came from Hollywood. It was in this mood that we first heard
the name Orson Welles in the summer of 1946. I rather think that his unusual
first name contributed to our fascination: Orson sounded like ourson, a bear cub,
and we heard that this cub was only thirty, that he’d made Citizen Kane at twenty-
six, the same age at which Eisenstein had made Potemkin.
The French critics were full of praise—Jean-Paul Sartre, who had seen it in
America, wrote an article preparing the ground. Still, a number of them were
confused as they recounted the screenplay; they contradicted each other in the
various journals over the meaning of the word “rosebud.” Some critics said it
was the name given to the glass filled with snowflakes that slips from Kane’s hands
as he dies. Denis Martin and Andre Bazin were the leaders in this journalistic
inquiry and they persuaded the distributor, RKO, to add the subtitle “Rosebud”
at the precise moment when a child’s sled is going up in flames.
The confusion between the sled and the glass was exactly what Welles wished.
The glass was filled with drops of snow falling on a little house, and twice Kane
says the word in relation to the glass—first when he picks it up as his second
wife, Susan Alexander, is leaving him, and then, as he is dying, drops it.
As magical for us as “rosebud” was the name “Xanadu.” In France we
didn’t know Coleridge’s poem about Kubla Khan. Even though it is explicitly
quoted in the film, it was lost on our French ears in the text of “News on the
March.”
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree: . . .
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round.
i i 8 Movie Stars
It was thus reasonable to conclude that even the name Kane came from Khan,
as that of Arkadin probably came from Irina Ardakina, the actress-heroine of
Chekhov’s The Sea Gull.
Citizen Kane, which was never dubbed, sobered us up from our Hollywood
binge and made us more demanding film lovers. This film has inspired more vo¬
cations to cinema throughout the world than any other. This seems a little odd
since Welles’s work is always rightly described as inimitable, and also because
the influence he exerted, if it is sometimes discernible as in Mankiewicz’ The
Barefoot Contessa, Astruc’s Les Mauvaises Rencontres, Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes, and
Fellini’s 8 1 12 , is most often indirect and under the surface. The Hollywood
productions I spoke of earlier, which we had so loved, were seductive, but they
seemed unattainable. You could go again and again to see films like The Big Sleep,
Notorious, The Lady Eve, Scarlet Street, but these movies never hinted to us that
we would become filmmakers one day. They served only to show that, if cin¬
ema was a country, Hollywood was clearly its capital.
So, it was no doubt the double pro-and-con-Hollywood aspect that made Cit¬
izen Kane stir us so, as well as Welles’s impudent youth and a strong European
element in his attitudes. Even more than his wide travels, I think that it was his
intense and intimate knowledge of Shakespeare that gave Welles an anti-
Manichaean world view and allowed him to mix good and bad heroes so glee¬
fully. I will make a confession. I was fourteen in 1946 and had already dropped
out of school. I discovered Shakespeare through Orson Welles, just as my taste
for Bernard Hermann’s music brought me to Stravinsky, who so often was its
inspiration.
Because Welles was young and romantic, his genius seemed closer to us than
the talents of the traditional American directors. When Everett Sloane, who plays
the character of Bernstein in Kane, relates how, one day in 1896, his ferryboat
crossed the path of another in Hudson Bay on which there was a young woman
in a white dress holding a parasol, and that he’d only seen the girl for a second
but had thought of her once a month all his life ... ah, well, behind this
Chekhovian scene, there was no big director to admire, but a friend to discover,
an accomplice to love, a person we felt close to in heart and mind.
We loved this film absolutely because it was so complete—psychological, so¬
cial, poetic, dramatic, comic, grotesque. Kane both demonstrates and mocks the
will to power; it is a hymn to youth and a meditation on age, a study of the van¬
ity of all human ambition and a poem about deterioration, and underneath it all
a reflection on the solitude of exceptional beings, geniuses or monsters, mon¬
strous geniuses.
Citizen Kane has both the look of a “first film,” because of its grab bag of ex¬
periments, and a film of a director’s highest maturity, because of its universal
portrait of the world.
Francois T r uJJ out
i i 9
I didn’t understand until long after that first great encounter in July 1946 why
Kane is what it is and the'ways in which it is unique; it’s the only first film made
by a man who was already fam ous. Chaplin was only a little emigrant clown when
he made his debut in front of the camera. Renoir was, in the view of the pro¬
fession, just a daddy’s boy keeping himself busy with a camera and wasting his
family’s money when he shot Nana; Hitchcock was only a credits designer who
was being promoted when he made Blackmail. But Orson Welles was already
very well known in America—and not only because of the notorious radio play
about Martians—when he started Citizen Kane. He was a famous man and the
trade papers in Hollywood were laying for him. “Quiet,” they ordered, “genius
at work.” The normal course of events is to become famous after having made
a number of good films. It’s rare to be famous at twenty-six, and even rarer to
be given a film to make at that age. This is the reason that Citizen Kane is the only
first film to have for its theme celebrity as such. In the long run, it is clearly
Welles’s legend and precocity which enabled him to lay before us plausibly and
accurately the span of an entire lifetime—we follow Charles Foster Kane from
childhood to death. As opposed to a timid beginner who might try to make a
good film in order to win acceptance in the industry, Welles, with his consid¬
erable reputation already established, felt constrained to make a movie which
would sum up everything that had come before in cinema, and would prefigure
everything to come. His extravagant gamble paid off handsomely.
There has always been considerable talk about the technical aspect of Welles’s
work. Had he acquired all that technique in a few weeks before shooting Kane,
or had he picked it up by watching a lot of movies? The question is beside the
point. Hollywood is full of directors who have made forty films and still don’t
know howto fade two shots into each other harmoniously. To make a good film,
you need intelligence, sensitivity, intuition, and a few ideas, that’s all. Welles
had all these to spare. When Thatcher challenges him, “So, that’s really how you
think a newspaper should be run?” the young Kane answers, “I have absolutely
no experience in running a paper, Mr. Thatcher. I just try out all the ideas that
come into my head.”
When I see Kane today, I’m aware that I know it by heart, but in the way you
know a recording rather than a movie. I’m not always as certain what image
comes next as I am about what sound will burst forth, or the very timbre of the
next voice that I’m going to hear, or the musical link to the next scene. (Before
Kane, nobody in Hollywood knew how to set music properly in movies.) Kane
was the first, in fact the only, great film that uses radio techniques. Behind each
scene, there is a resonance which gives it its color: the rain on the windows of
the cabaret, “El Rancho,” when the investigator goes to visit the down-and-out
female singer who can only “work” Atlantic City; the echoes in the marble-lined
Thatcher library; the overlapping voices whenever there are several characters.
1 20
Movie Stars
A lot of filmmakers know enough to follow Auguste Renoir’s advice to fill the
eyes with images at all cost, but only Orson Welles understood that the sound
track had to be filled in the same way.
Before he had decided on Citizen Kane, Welles was preparing an adaptation
of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which the narrator would be replaced by
a subjective camera. Something of the idea is retained in Kane. The investigator,
Thomson, is shot from the back all through the film, which also discards the rules
of classical cutting according to which one scene must be backed onto the next.
The story is moved along as if it were a newspaper story. Visually the film is
more aptly described as “page setting” rather than stage setting. A quarter of the
shots are faked, the camera manipulates almost as if it were an animated film.
So many of the shots in depth of focus—the glass of poison in Susan’s bedroom,
to begin with—were trick shots, a kind of “hide-and-don’t-seek,” the cinematic
equivalent of the photomontage of sensational newspapers. One can also view
Citizen Kane as a film of artful manipulation if you compare it to its successor,
The Magnificent Ambersons, which is the opposite, a romantic film with drawn-
out scenes, an emphasis on action over camera work, the stretching of real time.
In The Magnif icent Ambersons Welles uses less than two-hundred shots to re¬
late a story which spans twenty-five years (as opposed to 562 in Citizen Kane),
as if the second movie had been shot in a fury by a different director who hated
the first and wanted to give Welles a lesson in modesty. Because he’s always very
much the artist and the critic, Welles is a director who is very easily carried away
but who later judges his flights of fancy on the cutting table with growing at¬
tention in his subsequent films. Many of Welles’s recent films give the impres¬
sion that they were shot by an exhibitionist and edited by a censor.
Let’s return to Citizen Kane, in which everything happens as if Welles, with
extraordinary arrogance, had rejected the rules of cinema, the limits of its pow¬
ers of illusion and, with quick strokes and tricks—some more clever and suc¬
cessful than others—made his movie resemble the form of American comics in
which fantasy allows the artist to draw one character close up, behind him at
full length the person who’s talking to him, and at the back ten characters with
the designs on their ties as clear as the wart on the nose of the character in
closeup. It’s this singular marvel, never reedited, that is brought off fifty times
in a row. It gives the film a stylization, an idealization of visual effects that had
not been attempted since Murnau’s films The Last Laugh and Sunrise. The great
moviemakers who are conscious of form—Mumau, Lang, Eisenstein, Dreyer,
Hitchcock—all got their start before the talkies, and it’s no exaggeration to see
in Welles the only great natural visual artist to arrive on the scene after the ad¬
vent of sound.
If you see a superb scene from a Western, it could be John Ford, Raoul Walsh,
William Wellman, or Michael Curtiz, whereas Welles’s style, like Hitchcock’s,
Ft an f o i s TruJJaut
i 2 i
is instantly recognizable. Welles’s visual mode is his alone, and it is inimitable
because, for one reason, like Chaplin’s, it emanates from the physical presence
of the author-actor at the center of the screen. It is Welles who comes slowly
across the image; who creates a hubbub and then breaks it by suddenly speak¬
ing very softly; Welles who hurls his retorts over the heads of his characters as
if he deigned to speak only to the gods (the Shakespearean influence); Welles,
working against all custom, who breaks away from the flat horizon so that some¬
times the whole scene spins haphazardly, the ground seeming to seesaw in front
of the hero as he strides toward the lens.
Welles might well find all other films slack, flat, static, because his are so dy¬
namic. They unroll before the eyes the way music moves in the ear.
Seeing Citizen Kane again today, we discover something else: this film, which
had seemed extravagantly luxurious and expensive, is made up of fragments of
stage tricks, actually put together out of odds and ends. There are very few ex¬
tras and a lot of stock shots, lots of large pieces of furniture but a great many
faked walls, and, above all, a lot of closeups of small bells, cymbals, “spliced-
in” shots, newspapers, accessories, photographs, miniature portraits, a great
many fade-ins and dissolves. The truth is that Citizen Kane is a film that if not
cheap was at least modest, and was made to look sumptuous on the cutting-room
table. This result was achieved by an enormous amount of work to enhance all
the separate elements, and especially through the extraordinary strengthening
of the visual track by the most ingenious sound in the history of movies.
When I saw Citizen Kane as an adolescent film buff, I was overcome with admi¬
ration for the film’s main character. I thought he was marvelous, splendid, and
I linked Orson Welles and Charles Foster Kane in the same idolatry. I thought
the film was a panegyric to ambition and power. When I saw it again, after I’d
become a critic, accustomed to analyzing my enjoyment, I discovered its true
critical point of view: satire. I understood then that we’re supposed to sympa¬
thize with the character of Jedediah Leland (played by Joseph Cotten). I saw that
the film clearly demonstrates the absurdity of all worldly success. Today, now
that I am a director, when I see Kane again for perhaps the thirtieth time, it is
its twofold aspect as fairy tale and moral fable that strikes me most forcefully.
I can’t say whether Welles’s work is puritanical because I don’t know the sig¬
nificance of the word in America, but I’ve always been struck by its chastity.
Kane’s downfall is brought about by a sexual scandal: “Candidate Kane found in
bed with ‘singer’ ”; and yet we’ve observed that Kane’s and Susan’s relation¬
ship was a father-daughter, protective bond. Their liaison, if one can call it that,
is actually linked to Kane’s childhood and to the idea of family. It’s when he’s
coming back from a family pilgrimage (he had gone to see his parents’ furniture,
I 22
Movie Stars
including probably the sled “Rosebud” stored in a shed) that he meets Susan on
the street. She’s coming out of a drugstore, holding her jaw because she has a
toothache. He’s just been splashed by a passing car. Notice that later Kane twice
pronounces the word “rosebud”—when he’s apparently dying and once before
that, when Susan leaves him. He smashes all the furniture in his bedroom—it’s
a famous scene—but note that Kane’s anger is only appeased when he takes the
glass in his hand. At that point, it is quite clear that “rosebud,” already connected
to his separation from his mother, will henceforth be linked to Susan’s aban¬
doning him. There are partings which are like deaths.
What we already have found in Citizen Kane, and will find better expressed
in other of Welles’s works, is a world view which is personal, generous, and
noble. There is no vulgarity, no meanness in this film, only the satirical, imbued
by a fresh and imaginative antibourgeois morality, a lecture on how to behave:
what to do, what not to do.
What all of Welles’s films have in common is a liberalism, the assertion that
belief in conservatism is an error. The fragile giants that are at the center of his
cruel fables discover that you cannot conserve anything—not youth, not power,
not love. Charles Foster Kane, George Minafer Amberson, Michael O’Hara,
Gregory Arkadin come to understand that life is made up of terrible tears and
wrenches.
James Dean Is Dead
O n the evening of September 30, 19^, against the wishes of the Warner Broth¬
ers studio executives, James Dean got behind the wheel of his sports car and was
killed on a road in northern California.
The news, which we learned in Paris the next day, did not arouse much emo¬
tion at the time. A young actor, twenty-four years old, was dead. Six months
have passed and two of his films have appeared, and now we realize what we
have lost.
Dean had been noticed two years before on Broadway when he played the
role of the young Arab in an adaptation of Andre Gide’s The lmmoralist. Following
that, Elia Kazan starred him in East of Eden —Dean’s movie debut. Then Nicholas
Ray chose him for the hero of Rebel Without a Cause, and finally George Stevens
picked him to play the principal role in Giant, the story of a man we follow from
twenty to sixty. His next part was to have been the boxer Rocky Graziano in
Somebody Up There Likes Me.
Dean worked very hard at Giant; he never took his eye off George Stevens
or the camera. When the film was finished, he told his agent, Dick Clayton, “I
think I could be a better director than an actor.” He wanted to establish an in-
Ft an f o i s Truff aut
123
dependent company so he could shoot only properties he had chosen himself.
Clayton promised to talk it over with the Warner Brothers executives. Then,
Dean, who had been forbidden by contract to drive his car while the film was
being shot, roared off to Salinas to compete in a race.
The accident: “I think I’ll take a ride in the Spyder [the brand name of his
Porsche],” he told George Stevens. Near Paso Robles that evening, he and his
Spyder were cut off by another car coming onto the highway from a side road.
Dean died from multiple fractures and internal contusions on the way to the hos¬
pital .
It was his fate to die before his time, as have so many artists.
James Dean’s acting flies in the face of fifty years of filmmaking; each gesture,
attitude, each mimicry is a slap at the psychological tradition. Dean does not
“show off” the text by understatement like Edwige Feuillere; he does not evoke
its poetry, like Gerard Philipe; he does not play with it mischievously like Pierre
Fresnay. By contrast, he is anxious not to show that he understands perfectly
what he is saying, but that he understands it better than the director did. He acts
something beyond what he is saying; he plays alongside the scene; his expression
doesn’t follow the conversation. He shifts his expression from what is being ex¬
pressed in the way that a consummately modest genius might express profound
thoughts self-deprecatingly, as if to excuse himself for his genius, so as not to
make a nuisance of himself.
There were special moments when Chaplin reached the ultimate in mime:
he became a tree, a lamppost, an animal-skin rug next to a bed. Dean’s acting
is more animal than human, and that makes him unpredictable. What will his
next gesture be? He may keep talking and turn his back to the camera as he fin¬
ishes a scene; he may suddenly throw his head back or let it droop; he may raise
his arms to heaven, stretch them forward, palms up to convince, down to re¬
ject. Hemay, in a single scene, appear to be the son of Frankenstein, a little squir¬
rel, a cowering urchin or a broken old man. His nearsighted look adds to the
feeling that he shifts between his acting and the text; there is a vague fixedness,
almost a hypnotic half-slumber.
When you have the good luck to write for an actor of this sort, an actor who
plays his part physically, carnally, instead of filtering everything through his brain,
the easiest way to get good results is to think abstractly. Think of it this way:
James Dean is a cat, a lion, or maybe a squirrel. What can cats, lions and squir¬
rels do that is most unlike humans? A cat can fall from great heights and land on
its paws; it can be run over without being injured; it arches its back and slips
away easily. Lions creep and roar; squirrels jump from one branch to another.
So, what one must write are scenes in which Dean creeps (amid the beanstalks),
124 Movie Stars
roars (in a police station), leaps from branch to branch, falls from a great height
into an empty pool without getting hurt. I like to think this is how Elia Kazan,
Nicholas Ray, and, I hope, George Stevens proceeded.
Dean’s power of seduction was so intense that he could have killed his par¬
ents every night on the screen with the blessing of the snobs and the general pub¬
lic alike. One had to witness the indignation in the movie house when, in East
of Eden, his father refuses to accept the money that Cal earned with the beans,
the wages of love.
More than just an actor, James Dean, like Chaplin, became a personality in
only three films: Jimmy and the beans and at the country fair, Jimmy on the grass,
Jimmy in the abandoned house. Thanks to Elia Kazan’s and Nicholas Ray’s sen¬
sitivity to actors, James Dean played characters close to the Baudelairean hero
he really was.
The underlying reasons for his success? With women, the reason is obvious
and needs no explanation. With young men, it was because they could identify
with him; this is the basis for the commercial success of his films in every coun¬
try of the world. It is easier to identify with James Dean than with Humphrey
Bogart, Cary Grant, or Marlon Brando. Dean’s personality is truer. Leaving a
Bogart movie, you may pull your hat brim down; this is no time for someone
to hassle you. After a Cary Grant film, you may clown around on the street;
after Brando, lower your eyes and feel tempted to bully the local girls. With
Dean, the sense of identification is deeper and more complete, because he con¬
tains within himself all our ambiguity, our duality, our human weaknesses.
Once again, we have to go back to Chaplin, or rather Charlie. Charlie always
starts at the bottom and aims higher. He is weak, despised, left out. He fails in
all his efforts; he tries to sit down to relax and ends up on the ground, he’s ridicu¬
lous in the eyes of the woman he courts or in the eyes of the brute he wants to
tame. What happens at this point is a pure gift: Chaplin will avenge himself and
win out. Suddenly he begins to dance, skate, spin better than anyone else, and
now he eclipses everyone, he triumphs, he changes the mood and has all the jeer-
ers on his side.
What started out as an inability to adapt becomes super-adeptness. The en¬
tire world, everybody and everything that had been against him, is now at his
service. All this is true of Dean, too, but we must take into account a funda¬
mental difference: never do we catch the slightest look of fear. James Dean is
beside everything; in his acting neither courage nor cowardice has any place any
more than heroism or fear. Something else is at work, a poetic game that lends
authority to every liberty—even encourages it. Acting right or wrong has no
meaning when we talk about Dean, because we expect a surprise a minute from
him. He can laugh when another actor would cry—or the opposite. He killed
psychology the day he appeared on the set.
Rex Reed
I2J
With James Dean everything is grace, in every sense of the word. That’s his
secret. He isn’t better than everybody else; he does something else, the opposite;
he protects his glamour from the beginning to end of each film. No one has ever
seen Dean walk; he ambles or runs like a mailman’s faithful dog (think of the
opening of East of Eden). Today’s young people are represented completely in
James Dean, less for the reasons that are usually given—violence, sadism,
frenzy, gloom, pessimism, and cruelty—than for other reasons that are infinitely
more simple and everyday: modesty, continual fantasizing, a moral purity not
related to the prevailing morality but in fact stricter, the adolescent’s eternal
taste for experience, intoxication, pride, and the sorrow at feeling “outside,” a
simultaneous desire and refusal to be integrated into society, and finally accep¬
tance and rejection of the world, such as it is.
No doubt Dean’s acting, because of its contemporaneous quality, will start
a new Hollywood style, but the loss of this young actor is irreparable; he was
perhaps the most inventively gifted actor in films. Good cousin of Dargelos that
he was, he met his death on the road, one cool September evening, like the young
American described in Cocteau’s Enfants Terribles: “. . . the car leapt, twisted,
crashed against a tree and became a silent ruin, one wheel spinning slower and
slower like a raffle wheel.”
R.EX R.EED
Rex Reed was a gifted and innovative magazine writer in the 1960s, although his later
fame dissipated that role; by becoming a celebrity himselj, he got inside the system and
could no longer see it in quite the same way. He started as irreverent and became protec¬
tive. But he was certainly one of the most influential inventors of the new style of celebrity
interview that began toflourish in Esquire and has since more or less defined how movie
stars are described in print. He wrote about his interview experiences, seeing his subjects
in the round, reporting everything he was allowed to see, or glimpse, or guess.
Movie Stars
1 26
“Ava: Life in the Afternoon”
She stands there, without benefit of a filter lens, against a room melting under
the heat of lemony sofas and lavender walls and cream-and-peppermint-striped
movie-star chairs, lost in the middle of that gilt-edge birthday-cake hotel of cu-
pids and cupolas called The Regency. There is no script. No Minnelli to adjust
the CinemaScope lens. Ice-blue rain beats against the windows and peppers Park
Avenue below as Ava Gardner stalks her pink malted-milk cage like an elegant
cheetah. She wears a baby-blue cashmere turtleneck sweater pushed up to her
Ava elbows and a little plaid mini-skirt and enormous black hom-rimmed glasses
and she is gloriously, divinely barefoot.
Elbowing his way through the mob of autograph hunters and thrill seekers
clustered in the lobby, all the way up in the gilt-encrusted elevator, the press
agent Twentieth Century-Fox has sent along murmurs, “She doesn’t see any¬
body, you know,” and “You’re very lucky, you’re the only one she asked for.”
Remembering, perhaps, the last time she had come to New York from her hide¬
out in Spain to ballyhoo The Night of the Iguana and got so mad at the press she
chucked the party and ended up at Birdland. And nervously, shifting feet under
my Brooks Brothers polo coat, I remember too all the photographers at whom
she allegedly threw champagne glasses (there is even a rumor that she shoved
one Fourth Estater off a balcony!), and—who could forget, Charlie?—the holo¬
caust she caused the time Joe Hyams showed up with a tape recorder hidden in
his sleeve.
Now, inside the cheetah cage without a whip and trembling like a nervous
bird, the press agent says something in Spanish to the Spanish maid. “Hell, I’ve
been there ten years and I still can’t speak the goddamn language,” says Ava, dis¬
missing him with a wave of the long porcelain Ava arms. “Out! I don’t need press
agents.” The eyebrows angle under the glasses into two dazzling, sequined ques¬
tion marks. “Can I trust him?” she asks, grinning that smashing Ava grin, and
pointing at me. The press agent nods, on his way to the door: “Is there anything
else we can do for you while you’re in town?”
“Just get me out of town, baby. Just get me outta here.”
The press agent leaves softly, walking across the carpet as if treading on rose
glass with tap shoes. The Spanish maid (Ava insists she is royalty, “She follows
me around because she digs me”) closes the door and shuffles off into another
room.
“You do drink—right, baby? The last bugger who came to see me had the gout
and wouldn’t touch a drop.” She roars a cheetah roar that sounds suspiciously
like Geraldine Page playing Alexandra Del Lago and mixes drinks from her
portable bar: Scotch and soda for me, and for herself a champagne glass full of
Rex Reed
127
cognac with another champagne glass full of Dom Perignon, which she drinks
successively, refills and sips slowly like syrup through a straw. The Ava legs dan¬
gle limply from the arm of a lavender chair while the Ava neck, pale and tall as
a milkwood vase, rises above the room like a Southern landowner inspecting a
cotton field. At forty-four, she is still one of the most beautiful women in the
world.
“Don’t look at me. 1 was up until four a.m. at that goddam premiere of The
Bible. Premieres! I will personally kill that John Huston if he ever drags me into
another mess like that. There must have been ten thousand people clawing at
me. I get claustrophobia in crowds and I couldn’t breathe. Christ, they started
off by shoving a TV camera at me and yelling, ‘Talk, Aval’ At intermission I got
lost and couldn’t find my goddam seat after the lights went out and I kept telling
those little girls with the bubble hairdos and the flashlights, ‘I’m with John Hus¬
ton,’ and they kept saying, ‘We don’t know no Mr. Huston, is he from Fox?’
There I was fumbling around the aisles in the dark and when I finally found my
seat somebody was sitting in it and there was a big scene getting this guy to give
me my seat back. Let me tell you, baby, Metro used to throw much better cir¬
cuses than that. On top of it all, I lost my goddam mantilla in the limousine.
Hell, it was no souvenir, that mantilla. I’ll never find another one like it. Then
Johnny Huston takes me to this party where we had to stand around and smile
at Artie Shaw, who I was married to, baby, for Chrissake, and his wife Evelyn
Keyes, who Johnny Huston was once married to, for Chrissake. And after it’s
all over, what have you got? The biggest headache in town. Nobody cares who
the hell was there. Do you think for one minute the fact that Ava Gardner showed
up at that circus will sell that picture? Christ, did you see it? I went through all
that hell just so this morning Bosley Crowther could write I looked like I was
posing for a monument. All the way through it I kept punching Johnny on the
arm and saying, ‘Christ, how could you let me do it?’ Anyway, nobody cares
what I wore or what I said. All they want to know anyway is was she drunk and
did she stand up straight. This is the last circus. I am not a bitch! I am not tem¬
peramental! I am scared, baby. Scared. Can you possibly understand what it’s
like to feel scared?”
She rolls her sleeves higher than the elbows and pours two more champagne
glasses full. There is nothing about the way she looks, up close, to suggest the
life she has led: press conferences accompanied by dim lights and an orchestra;
bullfighters writing poems about her in the press; rubbing Vaseline between her
bosoms to emphasize the cleavage; roaming restlessly around Europe like a
woman without a country, a Pandora with her suitcases full of cognac and Her-
shey bars (“for quick energy”). None of the ravaged, ruinous grape-colored lines
to suggest the affairs or the br awls that bring the police in the middle of the night
or the dancing on tabletops in Madrid cellars till dawn.
The doorbell rings and a pimply-faced boy with a Beatle hairdo delivers one
28
Movie Stars
dozen Nathan’s hot dogs, rushed from Coney Island in a limousine. “Eat,” says
Ava, sitting crosslegged on the floor, biting into a raw onion.
“You’re looking at me again!”she says shyly, pulling short girlish wisps of hair
behind the lobes of her Ava ears. I mention the fact that she looks like a Vassar
co-ed in her mini-skirt. “Vassar?” she asks suspiciously. “Aren’t they the ones
who get in all the trouble?”
“That’s Radcliffe.”
She roars. Alexandra Del Lago again. “I took one look at myself in The Bible
and went out this morning and got all my hair cut off. This is the way I used to
wear it at M-G-M. It takes years off. What’s that?” Eyes narrow, axing her guest
in half, burning holes in my notebook. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those peo¬
ple who always go around scribbling everything on little pieces of paper. Get
rid of that. Don’t take notes. Don’t ask questions either because I probably won’t
answer any of them anyway. Just let Mama do all the talking. Mama knows best.
You want to ask something, I can tell. Ask.”
I ask if she hates all of her films as much as The Bible.
“Christ, what did I ever do worth talking about? Every time I tried to act,
they stepped on me. That’s why it’s such a goddam shame, I’ve been a movie
star for twenty-five years and I’ve got nothing, nothing to show for it. All I’ve
got is three lousy ex-husbands, which reminds me. I’ve got to call Artie and ask
him what his birthday is. I can’t remember my own family’s birthdays. Only rea¬
son I know my own is because I was born the same day as Christ. Well, almost.
Christmas Eve. 1922. That’s Capricorn, which means a lifetime of hell, baby.
Anyway, I need Artie’s birthday because I’m trying to get a new passport. I tramp
around Europe, but I’m not giving up my citizenship, baby, for anybody. Did
you ever try living in Europe and renewing your passport? They treat you like
you’re a goddam Communist or something. Hell that’s why I’m getting the hell
out of Spain, because I hate Franco and I hate Communists. So now they want
a list of all my divorces so I told them hell, call The New York Times —they know
more about me than I do!”
But hadn’t all those years at M-G-M been any fun at all? “Christ, after sev¬
enteen years of slavery, you can ask that question? I hated it, honey. I mean I’m
not exactly stupid or without feeling, and they tried to sell me like a prize hog.
They also tried to make me into something I was not then aiid never could be.
They used to write in my studio bios that I was the daughter of a cotton farmer
from Chapel Hill. Hell, baby, I was born on a tenant farm in Grabtown. How’s
that grab ya? Grabtown, North Carolina. And it looks exactly the way it sounds.
I should have stayed there. The ones who never left home don’t have a pot to
pee in but they’re happy. Me, look at me. What did it bring me?” She finishes
off another round of cognac and pours a fresh one. “The only time I’m happy is
when I’m doing absolutely nothing. When I work I vomit all the time. I know
Rex Reed
29
nothing about acting so I have one rule—trust the director and give him heart
and soul. And nothing else.” (Another cheetah roar.) “I get a lot of money so I
can afford to loaf a lot. I don’t trust many people, so I only work with Huston
now. I used to trust Joe Mankiewicz, but one day on the set of The Barefoot Con-
tessa he did the unforgivable thing. He insulted me. He said, ‘You’re the sittin’est
goddam actress,’ and I never liked him after that. What I really want to do is
get married again. Go ahead and laugh, everybody laughs, but how great it must
be to tromp around barefoot and cook for some great goddamn son of a bitch
who loves you the rest of your life. I’ve never had a good man.”
What about Mickey Rooney? (A glorious shriek.) “Love comes to Andy
Hardy.”
Sinatra? “No comment,” she says to her glass.
A slow count to ten, while she sips her drink. Then, “And Mia Farrow?” The
Ava eyes brighten to a soft clubhouse green. The answer comes like so many
cats lapping so many saucers of cream. Unprintable.
Like a phonograph dropping a new LP, she changes the subject. “I only want
to do the things that don’t make me suffer. My friends are more important to
me than any thing. I know all kinds of people—bums, hangers-on, intellectuals,
a few phonies. I’m going to see a college boy at Princeton tomorrow and we’re
going to a ball game. Writers. I love writers. Henry Miller sends me books to
improve my mind. Hell, did you read Plexus ? I couldn’t get through it. I’m not
an intellectual, although when I was married to Artie Shaw I took a lot of courses
at U.C.L.A. and got A’s and B’s in psychology and literature. I have a mind, but
I never got a chance to use it doing every goddam lousy part in every goddam
lousy picture Metro turned out. I feel a lot, though. God, I’m sorry I wasted those
twenty-five years. My sister Dee Dee can’t understand why after all these years
I can’t bear to face a camera. But I never brought any thing to this business and
I have no respect for acting. Maybe if I had learned something it would be dif¬
ferent. But I never did anything to be proud of. Out of all those movies, what
can I claim to have done?”
“ Mogambo, The Hucksters —”
“Hell, baby, after twenty-five years in this business, if all you’ve got to show
for it is Mogambo and The Hucksters you might as well give up. Name me one ac¬
tress who survived all that crap at M-G-M. Maybe Lana Turner. Certainly Liz
Taylor. But they all hate acting as much as I do. All except for Elizabeth. She
used to come up to me on the set and say, ‘If only I could leam to be good,’ and
by God, she made it. I haven’t seen Virginia Woolf- —hell, I never go to movies—
but I hear she is good. I never cared much about myself. I didn’t have the emo¬
tional makeup for acting and I hate exhibitionists anyway. And who the hell was
there to help me or teach me acting was anything else? I really tried in Show Boat
but that was M-G-M crap. Typical of what they did to me there. I wanted to
130 Movie Stars
sing those songs—hell, I’ve still got a Southern accent—and I really thought Julie
should sound a little like a Negro since she’s supposed to have Negro blood.
Christ, those songs like Bill shouldn’t sound like an opera. So, what did they say?
‘Ava, baby, you can’t sing, you’ll hit the wrong keys, you’re up against real pros
in this film, so don’t make a fool of yourself.’ Pros\ Howard Keel? And Kathryn
Grayson, who had the biggest boobs in Hollywood? I mean I like Graysie, she’s
a sweet girl, but with her they didn’t even need 3-D! Lena Home told me to go
to Phil Moore, who was her pianist and had coached Dorothy Dandridge, and
he’d teach me. I made a damn good track of the songs and they said, ‘Ava, are
you outta your head?’ Then they got Eileen Wilson, this gal who used to do a
lot of my singing on screen, and she recorded a track with the same background
arrangement taken off my track. They substituted her voice for mine, and now
in the movie my Southern twang stops talking and her soprano starts singing—
hell what a mess. They wasted God knows how many thousands of dollars and
ended up with crap. I still get royalties on the goddam records I did.”
The doorbell rings and in bounces a little man named Larry. Larry has silver
hair, silver eyebrows and smiles a lot. He works for a New York camera shop.
“Larry used to be married to my sister Bea. If you think I’m something you ought
to see Bea. When I was eighteen I came to New York to visit them and Larry
took that picture of me that started this whole megilah. He’s a sonuvabitch, but
I love him.”
“Ava, I sure loved you last night in The Bible. You were really terrific, dar-
lin’.”
“Crap!” Ava pours another cognac. “I don’t want to hear another word about
that goddam Bible. I didn’t believe it and I didn’t believe that Sarah bit I played
for a minute. How could anybody stay married for a hundred years to Abraham,
who was one of the biggest bastards who ever lived?”
“Oh, darlin’, she was a wonderful woman, that Sarah.”
“She was a jerk!”
“Oh, darlin’, ya shouldn’ talk like that. God will hear ya. Don’tcha believe
in God?” Larry joins us on the floor and bites into a hot dog, spilling mustard on
his tie.
“Hell, no.” The Ava eyes flash.
“I pray to him every night, darlin’. Sometimes he answers, too.”
“He never answered me, baby. He was never around when I needed him. He
did nothing but screw up my whole life since the day I was born. Don’t tell me
about God! I know all about that bugger!”
The doorbell again. This time a cloak-and-dagger type comes in; he’s wear¬
ing an ironed raincoat, has seventeen pounds of hair and looks like he has been
living on plastic vegetables. He says he is a student at New York University Law
School. He also says he is twenty-six years old. “What?” Ava takes off her glasses
Rex Reed
i 3 i
for a closer look. “Your father told me you were twenty-seven. Somebody’s
lying!” The Ava eyes narrow and the palms of her hands are wet.
“Let’s get some air, fellas.” Ava leaps into the bedroom and comes out wear¬
ing a Navy pea jacket with a Woolworth scarf around her head. Vassar again.
“I thought you were gonna cook tonight, darlin’,” says Larry, throwing his
fist into a coat sleeve.
“I want spaghetti. Let’s go to the Supreme Macaroni Company. They let me
in the back door there and nobody ever recognizes anybody there. Spaghetti,
baby. I’m starved.”
Ava slams the door shut, leaving all the lights on. “Fox is paying, baby.” We
all link arms and follow the leader. Ava skips ahead of us like Dorothy on her
way to Oz. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Moving like a tiger through Regency
halls, melting with hot pink, like the inside of a womb.
“Are those creeps still downstairs?” she asks. “Follow me.”
She knows all the exits. We go down on the service elevator. About twenty
autograph hunters crowd the lobby. Celia, queen of the autograph bums, who
leaves her post on the door at Sardi’s only on special occasions, has deserted her
station for this. Ava’s in town this week. She sits behind a potted palm wearing a
purple coat and green beret, arms full of self-addressed postcards.
Cool.
Ava gags, pushes the hom-rims flat against her nose, and pulls us through the
lobby. Nobody recognizes her. “Drink time, baby!” she whispers, shoving me
toward a side stairway that leads down to The Regency Bar.
“Do you know who that was?” asks an Iris Adrian type with a mink-dyed fox
on her arm as Ava heads for the bar. We check coats and umbrellas and sud¬
denly we hear that sound-track voice, hitting E-flat.
“You sonuvabitchl I could buy and sell you. How dare you insult my friends?
Get me the manager!”
Larry is at her side. Two waiters are shushing Ava and leading us all to a cor¬
ner booth. Hidden. Darker than the Polo Lounge. Hide the star. This is New
York, not Beverly Hills.
“It’s that turtleneck sweater you’re wearing,” whispers Larry to me as the
waiter seats me with my back to the room.
“They don’t like me here, the bastards. I never stay in this hotel, but Fox is
paying, so what the hell? I wouldn’t come otherwise. They don’t even have a
jukebox, for Chrissake.” Ava flashed a smile in Metrocolor and orders a large
ice-tea glass filled with straight tequila. “No salt on the side. Don’t need it.”
“Sorry about the sweater—” I begin.
“You’re beautiful. Gr-r-r!” She laughs her Ava laugh and the head rolls back
and the little blue vein bulges on her neck like a delicate pencil mark.
Two tequilas later (“I said no salt!”) she is nodding grandly, surveying the bar
132
Movie Stars
like the Dowager Empress in the Recognition Scene. Talk buzzes around her
like hummingbird wings and she hears nothing. Larry is telling about the time
he got arrested in Madrid and Ava had to get him out of jail and the student is
telling me about N.Y.U. Law School and Ava is telling him she doesn’t believe
he’s only twenty-six years old and can he prove it, and suddenly he looks at his
watch and says Sandy Koufax is playing in St. Louis.
“You’re kidding!” Ava’s eyes light up like cherries on a cake. “Let’s go! God-
damit we’re going to St. Louis!”
“Ava, darlin’, I gotta go to work tomorrow.” Larry takes a heavy sip of his
Grasshopper.
“Shut up, you bugger. If I pay for us all to go to St. Louis we go to St. Louis!
Can I get a phone brought to this table? Someone call Kennedy airport and find
out what time the next plane leaves. I love Sandy Koufax! I love Jews! God, some¬
times I think I’m Jewish myself. A Spanish Jew from North Carolina. Waiter !”
The student convinces her that by the time we got to St. Louis they’d be
halfway through the seventh inning. Ava’s face falls and she goes back to her
straight tequila.
“Look at ’em, Larry,” she says. ‘They’re such babies. Please don’t go to Viet¬
nam.” Her face turns ashen. Julie leaving the showboat with William Warfield
singing OF Man River in the fog on the levee. “We gotta do it. . . .”
“What are you talkin’ about, darlin’?” Larry shoots a look at the law student
who assures Ava he has no intention of going to Vietnam.
“. . . didn’t ask for this world, the buggers made us do it. . . .” A tiny bub¬
ble bath of sweat breaks out on her forehead and she leaps up from the table.
“My God, I’m suffocating! Gotta get some air!” She turns over the glass of
tequila and three waiters are flying at us like bats, dabbing and patting and mak¬
ing great breathing noises.
Action/
The N.Y.U. student, playing Chance Wayne to her Alexandra Del Lago, is
all over the place like a trained nurse. Coats fly out of the checkroom. Bills
and quarters roll across the wet tablecloth. Ava is on the other side of the bar
and out the door. On cue, the other customers, who have been making elab¬
orate excuses for passing our table on their way to the bathroom, suddenly give
great breathy choruses of “Ava” and we are through the side door and out in
the rain.
Then as quickly as it started it’s over. Ava is in the middle of Park Avenue,
the scarf falling around her neck and her hair blowing wildly around the Ava eyes.
Lady Brett in the traffic, with a downtown bus as the bull. Three cars stop on a
green light and every taxi driver on Park Avenue begins to honk. The autograph
hunters leap through the polished doors of The Regency and begin to scream.
Inside, still waiting coolly behind the potted palm, is Celia, oblivious to the noise,
John O’Hara
133
facing the elevators, firmly clutching her postcards. No need to risk missing Ava
because of a minor commotion on the street. Probably Jack E. Leonard or Edie
Adams. Catch them next week at Danny’s.
Outside, Ava is inside the taxi flanked by the N.Y.U. student and Larry, blow¬
ing kisses to the new chum, who will never grow to be an old one. They are al¬
ready turning the comer into Fifty-seventh Street, fading into the kind of night,
the color of tomato juice in the headlights, that only exists in New York when
it rains.
“Who was it?” asks a woman walking a poodle.
“Jackie Kennedy,” answers a man from his bus window.
John O’Haka
John O’Hara (1905—1970) knew Hollywood inside out. He sold books and stories to the
movies, he wrote screenplays, and for a time in the 1940s he was the film critic for
Newsweek magazine. He was also a film fan, who judged actors and particularly ac¬
tresses according to his own unforgiving subjective standards. That’s clear in this brutally
frank letter to the producer David Brown, assessing the qualities of various stars under
discussion for starring roles in the movies of his novels.
from Selected Letters
TO: David Brown TLS, 3 pp. Wyoming
Princeton
6 April 59
Dear Dave:
Having made a clean sweep of the Academy awards—not even a set
dressing nomination 1 —I can give an objective opinion of the cere-
1 34
Movie Stars
monies, and I would say that except for Jerry Lewis and Mort Sahl, it
was the dullest exhibition I’ve ever seen in person or on TV. Luckily,
however, Jerry Lewis and Mort Sahl were there to remind everybody
that no matter how good the pictures may be, Hollywood can always
be depended upon to make a horse’s ass of itself. The great tradition of
cheapness and vulgarity will be maintained, even if only by a few stal¬
warts like Lewis and Sahl. The selection of those two snipes was an in¬
spired one, and if they can’t be signed up for next year, the Academy
ought to start right away to make a deal with Mickey Cohen 3 and Oscar
Levant, the only two names that come to mind as I consider the field of
worthy successors.
My personal interest in the proceedings began with Bergman, and I yield
to your earlier judgment: for From the Terrace she won’t do. But 1 also yield
to you as the picker of Rock Hudson. He might do. J I know I have seen
him in pictures, when I was writing the Collier’s column, but I honestly
don’t remember him. However, he looked all right tonight. With sadness
in my heart (for she was lovely in her day) I confess to the thought that in
not too many years Bergman will be able to do the Life of Eleanor Roo¬
sevelt very convincingly (we explain the accent by planting early that she
had a Swedish governess) but not all the skill of Shamroy, Ruttenberg,
Barnes, Daniels 4 and Thomas A. Edison will make her a convincing Na¬
talie. The only technician who could help her is Paul Weatherwax, who,
as you know, is a cutter; unless we resurrect Joe von Sternberg, 5 who,
long before you got in the business was famous for shooting through ten¬
nis racquets. But if we’re going to shoot through tennis racquets we might
as well sign Althea Gibson 6 and get a little action for our money. I can also
see that signing Althea might have other advantages, such as presenting the
American way of life favorably to the foreign market, which would make
us real big at the Cannes Film Festival, the club theaters in London, and
Loew’s Nairobi. Let us think about it. She is probably handled by Doc
Shurr, 7 who always liked tall ones.
My other personal interest tonight was in Susan Hayward, who may or
may not do A Rage to Live. I couldn’t tell much, because she appeared to
be loaded with a tranquilizer. Nobody has that much dignity, unassisted.
If she has, she’d certainly be perfect for Grace, since the one way to ruin
Grace on screen will be to show her without dignity.
Elizabeth Taylor has been spoken of as the lead in Butterfield 8 but since
then she has announced she is quitting pictures, and strangely enough I be¬
lieve her. A long time ago I used to hear that she hated pictures and was
forced to work by her ever-lovin’ family. By the look of Mr. Fisher 8
tonight she is still going to have to work, but I don’t think all the returns
John O'Hara
'3J
are in yet on Miss Taylor. For years I have had a morbid hunch about that
girl, and when Todd 9 was killed, you remember that the first reports had
her on the plane. The Irish, of which I am one, do have these morbid
hunches about certain people. True, we may have them so often that we
kind of copper our bets, but when I’ve had them strongly, they of ten come
true. Too often. If I were a serious young novelist I would make myself
an authority on Elizabeth Taylor, because she has such stuff as great nov¬
els are made on. Thus, when I read that she was going to do Butterfield 8
my immediate reaction was that Larry Weingarten and Pan Berman" 5 had
much more sense than I ever gave them credit for; and my secondary re¬
action was that if she ever read the book she would shy away from it be¬
cause I invented her in the same sense that I invented Frank Sinatra. (When
I invented Joey, Sinatra was about i 8; when I created Gloria Wandrous,
Elizabeth T aylor was 2.) But the big difference between Elizabeth T ay lor
and Gloria Wandrous is the difference between a local novel at a very spe¬
cific time, and a novel about a world symbol in what many people (not I)
think are the Final Fifties, which are anything but specific. It may be too
big a theme for a novel, although Cleopatra and Catherine the Great have
been cut down to size, centuries later.
In moments of humility and disappointment I sometimes think of my
own contributions to literature qua history, and I feel better. Julian Eng¬
lish. Gloria Wandrous (and Weston Liggett). Jimmy Malloy. Joey Evans.
Grace Caldwell Tate. Joe Chapin. Alfred Eaton. It’s quite a roster, but
nobody’s going to know it in our lifetime.
My new novel is coming into the stretch, a figure I use because it fin¬
ishes in a gallop, not because I am racing against anything except, possi¬
bly, time. But then I can’t seem to help that. I predict that it will sell about
40,000 copies in the trade edition, and that it is going to throw a lot of
people. I will lose some admirers, but that figures anyway. I got some new
ones with From the Terrace; I can tell that from the letters; especially many
who had never read me before. That is a book that people take person¬
ally, men and women, more than any of my books except Appointment in
Samarra. But I don’t figure to gain substantially from now on, in circula¬
tion; and critically I can only expect what might be called a consolidation
of respect while at the same time losing some of those who have gone along
with me so far. With that knowledge I have written this novel under less
tension than my last two big ones (this one will be about the size of TNF,
or less). I foresee no picture sale, by the way, so you will have to read it
on your own time, as a friend. There is a possible play in it, but I don’t
know who could dramatize it. Tennessee Williams has already redrama¬
tized Pal Joey under the title Sweet Bird of Youth, or I might have sug-
136
Movie Stars
gested him. But I guess this is one of those novels that should stay in its
original form. When I’ve finished I am going to think up something that
will make a good picture, specifically for the medium.
Come and see us soon. Sister joins me in affectionate regards,
John
'For Ten North Frederick.
’Los Angeles gangster.
1 From the Terrace starred Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
4 Cameramen.
‘Director Joseph von Sternberg.
‘Negro tennis player.
7 Louis Shurr, talent agent.
‘Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband.
’Mike Todd, Miss Taylor's fourth husband.
'“Laurence Weingarten and Pandro S. Berman, MGM producers.
Joan Didion
I know what Joan Didion means by her title because 1 could write an essay beginning in
the same place. John Wayne, who may after all have been the greatest star of thefirstffty
years of the talkies, was not a perfect man, but he was an engaging one, with few of the
airs and less of the touchiness of many of his contemporaries. What you saw was more or
less what you got. He was never given much respect as a "serious actor," but he commanded
the screen like few others, he found authority even in dialogue that would have sounded
ridiculous coming from anyone else, and he was the dominant figure in the western. He
was thefirstbig star I interviewed, and 1 remember a day in 196J at a southern military
base where he was shooting The Green Berets. Because helicopters were taking aerial
shots, no one out of costume could venture onto the ai field. Wayne was told by walkie-
talkie that his interviewer had arrived, and he came striding toward me in full combat
gear: helmet, boots, camoufage uniform, rife, grenades, canteen, sidearm. He was a long
way away. I stood in the shade, out of sight of the helicopters, and watched him walking
closer in the shimmering heat. Finally he was towering over me and sticking out a hand.
“John Wayne," he said. “I know," 1 said.
Joan Didion
'37
“John Wayne: A Love Song”
In the summer of 1943 I was eight, and my father and mother and small brother
and I were at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs. A hot wind blew through that
summer, blew until it seemed that before August broke, all the dust in Kansas
would be in Colorado, would have drifted over the tar-paper barracks and the
temporary strip and stopped only when it hit Pikes Peak. There was not much
to do, a summer like that: there was the day they brought in the first B-29, an
event to remember but scarcely a vacation program. There was an Officers’
Club, but no swimming pool; all the Officers’ Club had of interest was artifi¬
cial blue rain behind the bar. The rain interested me a good deal, but I could not
spend the summer watching it, and so we went, my brother and I, to the movies.
We went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the dark¬
ened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of
1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk,
heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called War of the Wildcats that
he would build her a house, “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods
grow.” As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the
heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues
and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never
been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where
the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain
forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.
I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total
recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my
childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of cer¬
tain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could
carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumor
struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question. In John
Wayne’s world, John Wayne was supposed to give the orders. “Let’s ride,” he
said, and “Saddle up.” “Forward ho,” and “A man’s gotta do what he’s got to do.”
“Hello, there,” he said when he first saw the girl, in a construction camp or on
a train or just standing around on the front porch waiting for somebody to ride
up through the tall grass. When John Wayne spoke, there was no mistaking his
intentions; he had a sexual authority so strong that even a child could perceive
it. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt
and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may
not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could
move free, could make his own code and live by it; a world in which, if a man
138 Movie Scars
did what he had to do, he could one day take the girl and go riding through the
draw and find himself home free, not in a hospital with something going wrong
inside, not in a high bed with the flowers and the drugs and the forced smiles,
but there at the bend in the bright river, the cottonwoods shimmering in the
early morning sun.
“Hello, there.” Where did he come from, before the tall grass? Even his his¬
tory seemed right, for it was no history at all, nothing to intrude upon the dream.
Born Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa, the son of a druggist. Moved as a
child to Lancaster, California, part of the migration to that promised land some¬
times called “the west coast of Iowa.” Not that Lancaster was the promise ful¬
filled; Lancaster was a town on the Mojave where the dust blew through. But
Lancaster was still California, and it was only a year from there to Glendale,
where desolation had a different flavor: antimacassars among the orange groves,
a middle-class prelude to Forest Lawn. Imagine Marion Morrison in Glendale.
A Boy Scout, then a student at Glendale High. A tackle for U.S.C., a Sigma Chi.
Summer vacations, a job moving props on the old Fox lot. There, a meeting with
John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that into this perfect
mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what
pass the trail had been lost. “Dammit,” said Raoul Walsh later, “the son of a bitch
looked like a man.” And so after a while the boy from Glendale became a star.
He did not become an actor, as he has always been careful to point out to in¬
terviewers (“How many times do I gotta tell you, I don’t act at all, I re-act”),
but a star, and the star called John Wayne would spend most of the rest of his
life with one or another of those directors, out on some forsaken location, in
search of the dream.
Out where the skies are a trifle bluer
Out wherefriendship's a little truer
That's where the West begins.
Nothing very bad could happen in the dream, nothing a man could not face
down. But something did. There it was, the rumor, and after a while the head¬
lines. “I licked the Big C,” John Wayne announced, as John Wayne would, re¬
ducing those outlaw cells to the level of any other outlaws, but even so we all
sensed that this would be the one unpredictable confrontation, the one shoot¬
out Wayne could lose. I have as much trouble as the next person with illusion
and reality, and I did not much want to see John Wayne when he must be (or
so I thought) having some trouble with it himself, but I did, and it was down in
Mexico when he was making the picture his illness had so long delayed, down
in the very country of the dream.
Joan Didion
' 39
It was John Wayne’s 16jth picture. It was Henry Hathaway’s 84th. It was num¬
ber 34 for Dean Martin, who was working off an old contract to Hal Wallis, for
whom it was independent production number 65. It was called The Sons of Katie
Elder, and it was a Western, and after the three-month delay they had finally shot
the exteriors up in Durango, and now they were in the waning days of interior
shooting at Estudio Churubusco outside Mexico City, and the sun was hot and
the air was clear and it was lunchtime. Out under the pepper trees the boys from
the Mexican crew sat around sucking caramels, and down the road some of the
technical men sat around a place which served a stuffed lobster and a glass of
tequila for one dollar American, but it was inside the cavernous empty com¬
missary where the talent sat around, the reasons for the exercise, all sitting
around the big table picking at huevos con queso and Carta Blanca beer. Dean Mar¬
tin, unshaven. Mack Gray, who goes where Martin goes. Bob Goodfried, who
was in charge of Paramount publicity and who had flown down to arrange for a
trailer and who had a delicate stomach. “Tea and toast,” he warned repeatedly.
“That’s the ticket. You can’t trust the lettuce.” And Henry Hathaway, the di¬
rector, who did not seem to be listening to Goodfried. And John Wayne, who
did not seem to be listening to anyone.
“This week’s gone slow,” Dean Martin said, for the third time.
“How can you say that?” Mack Gray demanded.
“This . . . week’s . . . gone . . . slow, that’s how I can say it.”
“You don’t mean you want it to end.”
“I’ll say it right out, Mack, I wantitto end. Tomorrow night I shave this beard,
I head for the airport, I say adios amigos ! Bye-bye muchachos\”
Henry Hathaway lit a cigar and patted Martin’s arm fondly. “Not tomorrow,
Dino.”
“Henry, what are you planning to add? A World War?”
Hathaway patted Martin’s arm again and gazed into the middle distance. At
the end of the table someone mentioned a man who, some years before, had
tried unsuccessfully to blow up an airplane.
“He’s still in jail,” Hathaway said suddenly.
“In jail?” Martin was momentarily distracted from the question whether to
send his golf clubs back with Bob Goodfried or consign them to Mack Gray.
“What’s he in jail for if nobody got killed?”
“Attempted murder, Dino,” Hathaway said gently. “A felony.”
“You mean some guy just tried to kill me he’d end up in jail?”
Hathaway removed the cigar from his mouth and looked across the table.
“Some guy just tried to kill me he wouldn’t end up in jail. How about you, Duke?”
Very slowly, the object of Hathaway’s query wiped his mouth, pushed back
his chair, and stood up. It was the real thing, the authentic article, the move which
had climaxed a thousand scenes on 163 flickering frontiers and phantasmagoric
battlefields before, and it was about to climax this one, in the commissary at Es-
Movie Stars
i 40
tudio Churubusco outside Mexico City. “Right,” John Wayne drawled. “I’d kill
him.”
Almost all the cast of Katie Elder had gone home, that last week; only the prin¬
cipals were left, Wayne, and Martin, and Earl Holliman, and Michael Ander¬
son, Jr., and Martha Hyer. Martha Hyer was not around much, but every now
and then someone referred to her, usually as “the girl.” They had all been to¬
gether nine weeks, six of them in Durango. Mexico City was not quite Durango;
wives like to come along to places like Mexico City, like to shop for handbags,
go to parties at Merle Oberon Pagliai’s, like to look at her paintings. But Du¬
rango. The very name hallucinates. Man’s country. Out where the West begins.
There had been ahuehuete trees in Durango; a waterfall, rattlesnakes. There had
been weather, nights so cold that they had postponed one or two exteriors until
they could shoot inside at Churubusco. “It was the girl,” they explained. “You
couldn’t keep the girl out in cold like that.” Henry Hathaway had cooked in Du¬
rango, gazpacho and ribs and the steaks that Dean Martin had ordered flown down
from the Sands; he had wanted to cook in Mexico City, but the management of
the Hotel Bamer refused to let him set up a brick barbecue in his room. “You
really missed something, Durango ,” they would say, sometimes joking and some¬
times not, until it became a refrain, Eden lost.
But if Mexico City was not Durango, neither was it Beverly Hills. No one
else was using Churubusco that week, and there inside the big sound stage that
said LOS hijos de katie elder on the door, there with the pepper trees and the
bright sun outside, they could still, for just so long as the picture lasted, main¬
tain a world peculiar to men who like to make Westerns, a world of loyalties
and fond raillery, of sentiment and shared cigars, of interminable desultory rec¬
ollections; campfire talk, its only point to keep a human voice raised against the
night, the wind, the rustlings in the brush.
“Stuntman got hit accidentally on a picture of mine once,” Hathaway would
say between takes of an elaborately choreographed fight scene. “What was his
name; married Estelle Taylor, met her down in Arizona.”
The circle would close around him, the cigars would be fingered. The deli¬
cate art of the staged fight was to be contemplated.
“I only hit one guy in my life,” Wayne would say. “Accidentally, I mean. That
was Mike Mazurki.”
“Some guy. Hey, Duke says he only hit one guy in his life, Mike Mazurki.”
“Some choice.” Murmurings, assent.
“It wasn’t a choice, it was an accident.”
“I can believe it.”
“You bet.”
“Oh boy. Mike Mazurki.”
And so it would go. There was Web Overlander, Wayne’s makeup man
for twenty years, hunched in a blue Windbreaker, passing out sticks of Juicy
Fruit. “Insect spray,” he would say. “Don’t tell us about insect spray. We saw
insect spray in Africa, all right. Remember Africa?” Or, "Steamer clams. Don’t
tell us about steamer clams. We got our fill of steamer clams all right, on the
Hatari! appearance tour. Remember Bookbinder’s?” There was Ralph Volkie,
Wayne’s trainer for eleven years, wearing a red baseball cap and carrying
around a clipping from Hedda Hopper, a tribute to Wayne. “This Hopper’s
some lady,” he would say again and again. “Not like some of these guys, all
they write is sick, sick, sick, how can you call that guy sick, when he’s got
pains, coughs, works all day, never complains. That guy’s got the best hook since
Dempsey, not sick.”
And there was Wayne himself, fighting through number 16^. There was
Wayne, in his thirty-three-year-old spurs, his dusty neckerchief, his blue shirt.
“You don’t have too many worries about what to wear in these things,” he said.
“You can wear a blue shirt, or, if you’re down in Monument Valley, you can
wear a yellow shirt.” There was Wayne, in a relatively new hat, a hat which made
him look curiously like William S. Hart. “I had this old cavalry hat I loved, but
I lent it to Sammy Davis. I got it back, it was unwearable. I think they all pushed
it down on his head and said O.K., John Wayne —you know, a joke.”
There was Wayne, working too soon, finishing the picture with a bad cold
and a racking cough, so tired by late afternoon that he kept an oxygen inhalator
on the set. And still nothing mattered but the Code. “That guy,” he muttered
of a reporter who had incurred his displeasure. “I admit I’m balding. I admit I
got a tire around my middle. What man fifty-seven doesn’t? Big news. Anyway,
that guy.”
He paused, about to expose the heart of the matter, the root of the distaste,
the fracture of the rules that bothered him more than the alleged misquotations,
more than the intimation that he was no longer the Ringo Kid. “He comes
down, uninvited, but I ask him over anyway. So we’re sitting around drinking
mescal out of a water jug.”
He paused again and looked meaningfully at Hathaway, readying him for the
unthinkable denouement. “He had to be assisted to his room.”
They argued about the virtues of various prizefighters, they argued about the
price of J & B in pesos. They argued about dialogue.
“As rough a guy as he is, Henry, I still don’t think he’d raffle off his mother’s
Bible”
“I like a shocker, Duke.”
They exchanged endless training-table jokes. “You know why they call this
memory sauce?” Martin asked, holding up a bowl of chili.
142
Movie Stars
“Why?”
“Because you remember it in the morning.”
“Hear that, Duke? Hear why they call this memory sauce?”
They delighted one another by blocking out minute variations in the free-for-
all fight which is a set piece in Wayne pictures; motivated or totally gratuitous,
the fight sequence has to be in the picture, because they so enjoy making it. “Lis¬
ten—this’ll really be funny. Duke picks up the kid, see, and then it takes both
Dino and Earl to throw him out the door— bow’s that?”
They communicated by sharing old jokes; they sealed their camaraderie by
making gentle, old-fashioned fun of wives, those civilizers, those tamers. “So
Senora Wayne takes it into her head to stay up and have one brandy. So for the
rest of the night it’s ‘Yes, Pilar, you’re right, dear. I’m a bully, Pilar, you’re
right, I’m impossible.’ ”
“You hear that? Duke says Pilar threw a table at him.”
“Hey, Duke, here’s something funny. That finger you hurt today, get the Doc
to bandage it up, go home tonight, show it to Pilar, tell her she did it when she
threw the table. You know, make her think she was really cutting up.”
They treated the oldest among them respectfully; they treated the youngest
fondly. “You see that kid?” they said of Michael Anderson, Jr. “What a kid.”
“He don’t act, it’s right from the heart,” said Hathaway, patting his heart.
“Hey, kid,” Martin said. “You’re gonna be in my next picture. We’ll have
the whole thing, no beards. The striped shirts, the girls, the hi-fi, the eye lights.”
They ordered Michael Anderson his own chair, with “big mike” tooled on the
back. When it arrived on the set, Hathaway hugged him. “You see that?” An¬
derson asked Wayne, suddenly too shy to look him in the eye. Wayne gave him
the smile, the nod, the final accolade. “I saw it, kid.”
On the morning of the day they were to finish Katie Elder, Web Over lander
showed up not in his Windbreaker but in a blue blazer. “Home, Mama,” he said,
passing out the last of his Juicy Fruit. “I got on my getaway clothes.” But he was
subdued. At noon, Henry Hathaway’s wife dropped by the commissary to tell
him that she might fly over to Acapulco. “Go ahead,” he told her. “I get through
here, all I’m gonna do is take Seconal to a point just this side of suicide.” They
were all subdued. After Mrs. Hathaway left, there was desultory attempts at
reminiscing, but man’s country was receding fast; they were already halfway
home, and all they could call up was the 1961 Bel Air fire, during which Henry
Hathaway had ordered the Los Angeles Fire Department off his property and
saved the place himself by, among other measures, throwing everything flam¬
mable into the swimming pool. “Those fire guys might’ve just given it up,”
Wayne said. “Just let it burn.” In fact this was a good story, and one incorpo-
Joan Did ion
1 43
rating several of their favorite themes, but a Bel Air story was still not a Du¬
rango story.
In the early afternoon they began the last scene, and although they spent as
much time as possible setting it up, the moment finally came when there was
nothing to do but shoot it. “Second team out, first team in, doors closed,” the as¬
sistant director shouted one last time. The stand-ins walked off the set, John
Wayne and Martha Hyer walked on. “All right, boys, silencio, this is a picture.”
They took it twice. Twice the girl offered John Wayne the tattered Bible. Twice
John Wayne told her that “there’s a lot of places I go where that wouldn’t fit
in.” Everyone was very still. And at 2:30 that Friday afternoon Henry Hathaway
turned away from the camera, and in the hush that followed he ground out his
cigar in a sand bucket. “O.K.,” he said. “That’s it.”
Since that summer of 1943 I had thought of John Wayne in a number of ways.
I had thought of him driving cattle up from Texas, and bringing airplanes in on
a single engine, thought of him telling the girl at the Alamo that “Republic is a
beautiful word.” I had never thought of him having dinner with his family and
with me and my husband in an expensive restaurant in Chapultepec Park, but
time brings odd mutations, and there we were, one night that last week in Mex¬
ico. For a while it was only a nice evening, an evening anywhere. We had a lot
of drinks and I lost the sense that the face across the table was in certain ways
more familiar than my husband’s.
And then something happened. Suddenly the room seemed suffused with the
dream, and I could not think why. Three men appeared out of nowhere, play¬
ing guitars. Pilar Wayne leaned slightly forward, and John Wayne lifted his glass
almost imperceptibly toward her. “We’ll need some Pouilly-Fuisse for the rest
of the table,” he said, “and some red Bordeaux for the Duke.” We all smiled,
and drank the Pouilly-Fuisse for the rest of the table and the red Bordeaux for
the Duke, and all the while the men with the guitars kept playing, until finally
I realized what they were playing, what they had been playing all along: “The
Red River Valley” and the theme from The High and the Mighty. They did not
quite get the beat right, but even now I can hear them, in another country and
a long time later, even as I tell you this.
44
Movie Stars
Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe was thefag bearer for the New Journalism, the one who used the most italics
and apostrophes jet was also a brilliant reporter. In this piece he handles the most basic
yet most difficult assignment of the celebrity reporter: the dreaded Hotel Room Interview,
although here the prey, Cary Grant, has at least moved downstairs to the dining room.
One is given a little under an hour to commune with a star who is inevitably "opening a
new picture" and who has come to town expressly to spend all day, or several days, talk¬
ing about it. In the days before "sound bites" had entered the language, these assembly
line PR ordeals had already perfected them. See here how, in the end, it is Wolfe who does
most of the talking.
“Loverboy of the Bourgeoisie”
On their way into the Edwardian Room of the Plaza Hotel all they had was that
sort of dutiful, forward-tilted gait that East Side dowagers get after twenty years
of walking small dogs up and down Park Avenue. But on their way out the two
of them discover that all this time, in the same room, there has been their
dreamboat, Cary Grant, sitting in the corner. Actually, Grant had the logistics
of the Edwardian Room figured out pretty well. In the first place, the people
who come to the Plaza for lunch are not generally the kind who are going to rise
up and run, skipping and screaming, over to some movie star’s table. And in
the second place, he is sitting up against the wall nearest the doorway. He is eat¬
ing lunch, consisting of a single bowl of Vichyssoise, facing out the window to¬
wards three old boys in silk toppers moseying around their horses and hansoms
on J9th Street on the edge of Central Park.
Well, so much for logistics. The two old girls work up all the courage they
need in about one-fourth of a second.
“Cary Grant!” says the first one, coming right up and putting one hand on his
shoulder. “Look at you! I just had to come over here and touch you!”
Tom Wo If e
■4J
Cary Grant plays a wonderful Cary Grant. He cocks his head and gives her
the Cary Grant mock-quizzical look—just like he does in the movies—the look
that says, “I don’t know what’s happening, but we’re not going to take it very
seriously, are we? Or are we?”
“I have a son who’s the spitting image of you,” she is saying.
Cary Grant is staring at her hand on his shoulder and giving her the Cary Grant
fey-bemused look and saying, “Are you trying to hold me down?”
“My son is forty-nine,” she’s saying. “How old are you?”
“I’m fifty-nine,” says Cary Grant.
"Fifty-ninel Well, he’s forty-nine and he’s the spitting image of you, except
that he looks older than you!”
By this time the other old girl is firmly planted, and she says: “I don’t care if
you hate me, I’m going to stand here and look at you.”
“Why on earth should I hate you?” says Cary Grant.
“You can say things about me after I’m gone. I don’t care, I’m going to stand
here and look at you!”
“You poor dear!”
Which she does, all right. She takes it all in; the cleft chin; this great sun tan
that looks like it was done on a rotisserie; this great head of steel-gray hair, of
which his barber says: “It’s real; I swear, I yanked it once”; and the Cary Grant
clothes, all worsteds, broadcloths and silks, all rich and underplayed, like a viola
ensemble.
“Poor baby,” says Cary Grant, returning to the Vichyssoise. “She meets some
one for the first time and already she’s saying, ‘I don’t care if you hate me. ’ Can
you imagine? Can you imagine what must have gone into making someone feel
that way?”
Well, whatever it was, poor old baby knows that Cary Grant is one leading
man who, at least, might give it a second thought. Somehow Cary Grant, they
figure, is the one dreamboat that a lady can walk right up to and touch, pour
soul over and commune with.
And by the time Grant’s picture, “Charade,” with Audrey Hepburn, had its
premiere at the Radio City Music Hall, thousands turned out in lines along joth
Street and Sixth Avenue, many of them in the chill of 6 A.M., in order to get an
early seat. This was Grant’s 6 ist motion picture and his 26th to open at Radio
City. He is, indeed, fifty-nine years old, but his drawing power as a leading man,
perhaps the last of the genuine “matinee idols,” keeps mounting toward some
incredible, golden-aged crest. Radio City is like a Nielsen rating for motion pic¬
tures. It has a huge seating capacity and is attended by at least as many tourists,
from all over the country, as New Yorkers. Grant’s first 2 <; premieres there
played a total of 99 weeks. Each one seems to break the records all over again.
Before “Charade,” “That Touch of Mink,” with Doris Day, played there for 10
weeks and grossed $1,886,427.
146 Movie St ars
And the secret of it all is somehow tied up with the way he lit up two aging
dolls in the Edwardian Room at the Plaza Hotel. In an era of Brandoism and the
Mitchumism in movie heroes, Hollywood has left Cary Grant, by default, in sole
possession of what has turned out to be a curiously potent device. Which is to
say, to women he is Hollywood’s lone example of the Sexy Gentleman. And to
men and women, he is Hollywood’s lone example of a figure America, like most
of the West, has needed all along: a Romantic Bourgeois Hero.
One has only to think of what the rest of Hollywood and the international
film industry, for that matter, have been up to since World War II. The key
image in film heroes has certainly been that of Marlon Brando. One has only to
list the male stars of the past 20 years—Brando, Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas,
John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, Victor Mature, William Holden,
Frank Sinatra—and already the mind is overpowered by an awesome montage
of swung fists, bent teeth, curled lips, popping neck veins, and gurglings. As
often as not the Brandoesque hero’s love partner is some thyroid hoyden, as por¬
trayed by Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida
or, more recently, Sue Lyons and Tuesday Weld. The upshot has been the era
of Rake-a-Cheek Romance on the screen. Man meets woman. She rakes his
cheek with her fingernails. He belts her in the chops. They fall in a wallow of
passion.
The spirit of these romances, as in so many of the early Brando, James Dean
and Rock Hudson pictures, has been borrowed from what Hollywood imagines
to be the beer-and-guts verve of the guys-and-dolls lower classes. Undoubtedly,
the rawness, the lubricity, the implicit sadism ofithas excited moviegoers of all
classes. Yet it should be clear even to Hollywood how many Americans, at rock
bottom, can find no lasting identification with it. The number of American men
who can really picture themselves coping with a little bleached hellion who is
about to rake a cheek and draw blood with the first kiss is probably embarrass¬
ingly small. And there are probably not many more women who really wish to
see Mister Right advancing toward them in a torn strap-style undershirt with
his latissimae dorsae flexed.
After all, this is a nation that, except for a hard core of winos at the bottom
and a hard crust of aristocrats at the top, has been going gloriously middle class
for two decades, as far as the breezeways stretch. There is no telling how many
millions of American women of the new era know exactly what Ingrid Bergman
meant when she said she loved playing opposite Cary Grant in “Notorious”
(1946): “I didn’t have to take my shoes off in the love scenes.”
Yet “Notorious,” one will recall, was regarded as a highly sexy motion pic¬
ture. The Grant plot formula—which he has repeated at intervals for 2 j years—
has established him as the consummate bourgeois lover: consummately roman¬
tic and yet consummately genteel. Grant’s conduct during a screen romance is
To m Wolfe
47
unfailingly of the sort that would inspire trust and delight, but first of all trust,
in a middle-class woman of any age. Not only does Grant spare his heroines any
frontal assault on their foundation garments, he seldom chases them at all at the
outset. In fact, the Grant plot formula calls for a reverse chase. First the girl—
Audrey Hepburn in “Charade,” Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief,” Betsy Drake
in “Every Girl Should Be Married”—falls for Grant. He retreats, but always
slowly and coyly, enough to make the outcome clear. Grant, the screen lover,
and Grant, the man, were perfectly combined under the escutcheon of the
middle-class American woman—“Every Girl Should Be Married”—when Grant
married Betsy Drake in real life.
During the chase Grant inevitably scores still more heavily with the middle-
class female psyche by treating the heroine not merely as an attractive woman
but as a witty and intelligent woman. And, indeed, whether he is with Katharine
Hepburn or Audrey Hepburn or Irene Dunne or Doris Day, both parties are bat¬
ting incredibly bright lines back and forth, and halfway through the film they
are already too maniacally witty not to click one way or another.
Because of the savoir faire, genial cynicism and Carlyle Hotel lounge accent
with which he brings it all off, Grant is often thought of as an aristocratic mo¬
tion picture figure. In fact, however, the typical Grant role is that of an excit¬
ing bourgeois. In “Charade” he is a foreign service officer in Paris; in “Bringing
Up Baby” he was a research professor; in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream
House” he was an enthusiastic suburbanite; and in countless pictures—among
them “Crisis,” “People Will Talk,” “Kiss and Make Up”—he was in the most
revered middle-class role of them all, exploited so successfully by television over
the past three years: the doctor. Seldom is Grant portrayed as a lower-class fig¬
ure—he did not make a good beatnik Cockney in “None But the Lonely Heart”—
and rarely is he anything so formidable as the trucking tycoon he played in “Bom
to Be Bad” in 1934. The perfect Grant role is one in which he has a job that gives
him enough free time so that he does not have to languish away at the office dur¬
ing the course of the movie; but he has the job and a visible means of support
and highly visible bourgeois respectability all the same.
Grant, of course, has had no Hollywood monopoly on either savoir faire or
gentility on the screen. Many suave, humorous gentlemen come to mind: Jimmy
Stewart, David Niven, Fred Astaire, Ronald Colman, Franchot Tone. None of
them, however, could approach Grant in that other part of being the world’s
best bourgeois romantic: viz., sex appeal. It was Cary Grant that Mae West was
talking about when she launched the phrase “tall, dark and handsome” in “She
Done Him Wrong” (1933), and it was Cary Grant who was invited up to see
her sometime. Even at age fifty-nine, the man still has the flawless squared-off
face of a comic strip hero, a large muscular neck and an athletic physique which
he still exhibits in at least one scene in each picture. Every good American girl
148 Movie Stars
wants to marry a doctor. But a Dr. Dreamboat? Is it too much to hope for? Well,
that is what Cary Grant is there for.
So Cary Grant keeps pouring it on, acting out what in the Age of Brando seems
like the most unlikely role in the world: the loverboy of the bourgeoisie. The
upshot has been intriguing. In 1948, at the age of forty-four he came in fourth
in the box-office poll of male star popularity, behind Clark Gable, Gary Cooper
and Bing Crosby. By 19 j8, when he was fifty-four, he had risen to No. 1. This
fall—when he was fifty-nine—the motion picture Theater Owners Association
named him as the No. 1 box-office attraction, male or female.
Well, the two old dolls had left, and the next crisis in the Edwardian Room
was that an Italian starlet had walked in, a kind of tabescent bijou blonde. Old
Cary Grant knows he has met her somewhere, but he will be damned if he can
remember who she was. His only hope is that she won’t see him, so he has his
head tucked down to one side in his Cary Grant caught-out-on-a-limb look.
He can’t keep that up forever, so he keeps his head turned by talking to the
fellow next to him, who has on a wild solaro-cloth suit with a step-collared vest.
“Acting styles go in fads,” Cary Grant is saying. “It’s like girls at a dance. One
night a fellow walks in wearing a motorcycle jacket and blue jeans and he takes
the first girl he sees and embraces her and crushes her rib cage. ‘What a man!’
all the girls say, and pretty soon all the boys are coming to the dances in mo¬
torcycle jackets andblue jeans and taking direct action. That goes on for a while,
and then one night in comes a fellow in a blue suit who can wear a necktie with¬
out strangling, carrying a bouquet of flowers. Do they still have bouquets of flow¬
ers? I’m sure they do. Well, anyway, now the girls say, ‘What a charmer!’ and
they’re off on another cycle. Or something like that.
“Well, as for me, I just keep going along the same old way,” says Cary Grant
with his Cary Grant let’s-not-get-all-wrapped-up-in-it look.
But now that the secret is out, the prospects are almost forbidding. Think of
all those Actors Studio people trussed up in worsted, strangling on Foulard silk,
speaking through the mouth instead of the nose, talking nice to love-stricken
old ladies in the Edwardian Room of the Plaza Hotel. The mind boggles, baby.
Donald Ritchie
149
Donald Ritchie
Donald Ritchie has lived in Japan for more than fifty years and knows more about the
Japanese cinema than anyone outside Japan and probably anyone inside as well. It was
he who first introduced Ozu to the West, after Japanese film executives argued he was "too
Japanese’’to be appreciated by Occidentals (in fact Ozu is the most universal of directors).
Ritchie has been a free lance for most of his time in Japan, writing a travel memoir (The
Inland Sea) that became a documentary film; writing the English subtitles for innumer-
ablefilms; writing books on theJapanese cinema, Ozu, and Kurosawa; writing novels and
short stories; and doing a regular column for the Japan Times. Hisbook Different Peo¬
ple contains an incredible essay that did not quite fit within the boundaries of this an¬
thology; it tells the story of the woman who by cutting off her lover’s penis in a death pact
inspired Oshima’sfilm In the Realm of the Senses. Ritchie finds her years later, em¬
ployed to walk across a nightclub foot once every night, so that the patrons, almost all
male, could simply look at her. In the following essay, also from Different People, he
considers the strange case of Setsuko Hara, who became the most popular ofJapanese film
stars and then one day simply walked away from it all.
“Setsuko Hara”
She must be in her sixties, Japan’s “eternal virgin”—so billed, even now, in the
continuing references to her in magazines, newspapers; even now, more than
twenty years after her disappearance.
That 1963 disappearance was a scandal. She had been the most beloved of
film stars, her handsome face, accepting smile, known to all. And then, suddenly,
rudely, without a word of apology, she was going to disappear—to retire.
Here, where the stars hang on, voluntary retirement is unknown, particu¬
larly for one the caliber of Setsuko Hara. She had become an ideal: men wanted
to marry someone like her; women wanted to be someone like her.
ijo Movie Stars
This was because on the screen she reconciled her life as real people cannot.
Whatever her role in films—daughter, wife, or mother—she played a woman
who at the same time, somehow, was herself. Her social roles did not eclipse
that individual self, our Setsuko.
In Ozu’s Late Spring she wanted to remain a daughter, did not want to be¬
come a wife. Staying on with her father was enough. But eventually she mar¬
ried and through it all she showed her real self. In Late Autumn, a 1960 version
of the 1949 film, she played the parent rather than the daughter. She was now
a mother, a widow, who realizes that it is best that her daughter get married,
though it means that she herself will be lonely. And through it all she showed
her real self.
This she did by transcending the limitations imposed on her. She won her free¬
dom by realizing that it is only within limitations that the concept of freedom is
relevant. She accepted.
At the conclusion of Tokyo Story she is talking with the younger daughter, who
has been upset by her elder sister’s behavior at the funeral. She would never want
to be like that, she says: That would be just too cruel.
The daughter-in-law, Setsuko Hara, agrees, then says: It is, but children get
that way . . . gradually.
—Then . . . you too? says the daughter.
—I may become like that. In spite of myself.
The daughter is surprised, then disturbed as she realizes the implications:
—But then . . . isn’t life disappointing?
And Setsuko smiles, a full, warm, accepting smile:
—Yes, it is.
She welcomed life, accepted its terms. In the same way she welcomed her
role, absorbed it into herself, left the precious social fabric intact. No matter
that her words were written and her actions directed by Yasujiro Ozu. This
screen persona became hers and, in any event, Ozu would not have created his
character this way had it not been Setsuko Hara for whom he was writing.
Thus, on the screen, she did not disturb harmony, she created it. And in this
harmony she found herself. It was for this that she was so loved.
Even her being an “eternal virgin” (never marrying, never having children in
a country where fertile wedlock is almost mandatory) was never held against
her. She was not, after all, an old maid. No, she was that positive thing, an eter¬
nal virgin.
And then this sudden retirement. And the way she did it. She simply an¬
nounced it. This was no way for an Ozu character to behave.
Great was the outcry. Her studio, for which she was the major box-office at¬
traction, tried every blandishment. She stood firm against them all. The critics,
who had formerly adored her, were hurt, insulted—there was talk of her being
onna rashikunai, un-womanlike. Them she ignored.
Donald Ritchie
i 5 t
And then there was what she said, the reasons she gave. She implied that she
had never enjoyed making films, that she had done so merely to make enough
money to support her large family, that she hadn’t thought well of anything she
had done in the films, and now that the family was provided for she saw no rea¬
son to continue in something she didn’t care for.
This was conveyed in the Setsuko Hara style, to be sure, with some show of
hesitation, sudden smiles shining through the doubt, but this was one Hara per¬
formance, the only one, that was not appreciated.
For the first time since her 19 3 j debut she was severely criticized, not so much
for wanting to retire as for the manner in which this desire was presented.
There was no polite fiction about the cares of age—she was only forty-three—
or about bad health or about a burning desire to take up charitable work, or a
spiritual imperative that she enter a nunnery. Nothing of the sort—only a state¬
ment that sounded like the blunt truth.
She was never forgiven. But press and public were allowed no further op¬
portunity to display their disappointment, for she never again appeared.
Where had she gone? It was as though she had walked from that final press
conference straight into oblivion. But of course there is no such thing as obliv¬
ion in Japan. She was shortly discovered living by herself, under her own name—
not the stage one chosen by studio officials—in a small house in Kamakura, where
many of her films had been set. And there she remains, remote but still the most
publicized of recluses, with readers of the daily or weekly press knowing what
she buys when she shops, how often her laundry is visible each week, and which
of her old school friends she sees.
Occasionally a photo is attempted, butherpastexperiencehasmadeher quick
to sense intruders, and the picture is always taken from so far away and the high¬
speed film is so grainy that it could be one of any elderly woman airing the bed¬
ding or hanging out the wash.
Over the years since her retirement, public anger, pique, and disappointment
have all faded. Only a hard-core curiosity has remained. This, and a new admi¬
ration.
It now seems, particularly to younger women, that this actress truly recon¬
ciled her life. Truly, in that though she played all the social roles—daughter,
wife, and mother—she only played them in her films. They were inventions,
these roles. They did not eclipse that individual self, our Setsuko. And in this
way she exposed them for the fictions that they are.
She did not allow them to define her; rather, she defined herself. And she
did this by setting up her own limitations, not those of her fictitious roles. Her
real limitations are the self-determined ones of the little Kamakura house, the
daily round, the visits with her women friends. Only within such chosen limits
is the concept of any real self at all relevant.
And so Setsuko Hara/Masae Aida continues as legend—to those of her own
i j 2 Movie Stars
time and to the young women who came later. And a legend exerts a compul¬
sive attraction for others, whether it wants to or not.
Thus, many timesha ve photos been sought, many times have parts on screen
or tube been offered, and only too often has the little house in Kamakura been
approached. The answer is always the same—the door of the little house has
been slammed in the intruders’ faces.
Even when a group of former friends and co-workers appeared. A docu¬
mentary was being made about the life and films of Yasujiro Ozu, Hara’s men¬
tor and the director who perhaps best captured, or created, this persona.
Wouldn’t she please appear in it? For the sake of her dead sensei? No door was
slammed this time. It was politely closed. But the answer was still no.
John Updike
I was starting out as ajilm critic at just about the time Doris Day’s movie career was end¬
ing, and 1 was not kind to her in several reviews. Perhaps movies like Where Were You
When the Lights Went Out? deserved to be mocked, but still —/ was being a smart¬
ass and knocking Doris Day because, in the atmosphere of the late 1960s, she was a fash¬
ionable target. Had I forgotten bow much 1 enjoyed her in Young at Heart or Please
Don’t Eat the Daisies or Pillow Talk or Teacher’s Pet? Later, when I went back and
looked at a lot of her other films, especially Love Me or Leave Me, 1 saw an enormous
talent. 1 realized that with Day 1 had notfollowed Robert Warshow’s advice (“A man goes
to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man’). 1 had not ac¬
knowledged that I liked and admired a lot of what she had done. Here is John Updike,
reviewing her autobiography and following Warshow’s advice.
“Suzie Creamcheese Speaks”
I have fallen in love with rather few public figures—with Errol Flynn, Ted
Williams, Harry Truman, and Doris Day. The three men have a common de-
John Updike
53
nominator in cockiness; how cocky Miss Day also is did not strike me until the
reading of Doris Day: Her Own Story, as orchestrated by A. E. Hotchner. “I must
emphasize,” she tells us in the autobiographical tapes that Hotchner has edited,
“that I have never had any doubts about my ability in anything I have ever un¬
dertaken.” Elsewhere, in describing her audition, at the age of sixteen, for the
job of lead singer with Bob Crosby’s Bobcats, she says, “But to be honest about
it, despite my nervousness and reluctance to sing for these mighty profession¬
als, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t get the job. I have never tried out
for anything that I failed to get.” And, it is true, her life shows a remarkably con¬
sistent pattern of professional success, alternating with personal tribulation.
When she was eleven, her father, “Professor” William Kappelhoff, Cincinnati’s
“most sought-after conductor,” left her mother for another woman; when Doris
was twelve, the dance team of Doris & Jerry won the grand prize in a city wide
amateur contest, and with the money they visited Hollywood, where people
“were so enthusiastic about our ability that I had no doubt that we would do very
well.” But when she left a farewell party given on the eve of her moving to Hol¬
lywood, a locomotive struck the car in which she was riding. Her right leg was
shattered and her dancing career with it (Jerry’s, too; without Doris Kappel¬
hoff as a partner, he became in time a Cincinnati milkman). During her nearly
two years of convalescence, Doris listened to the radio, admiring especially the
singing of Ella Fitzgerald, and before she was off crutches she was performing
in a downtown Chinese restaurant and on local radio. A Cincinnati night-club
job led to Chicago and the Bobcats, and from there to Les Brown and his Blue
Devils—all this before her seventeenth birthday.
In one of the interviews that Hotchner usefully splices into his subject’s ac¬
count of her days, Les Brown remembers that he “listened to her for five min¬
utes, immediately went backstage, and signed her for my band. She was every
band leader’s dream, a vocalist who had natural talent, a keen regard for the
lyrics, and an attractive appearance. . . . The reason her salary rose so precipi¬
tously was that virtually every band in the business tried to hire her away from
me.” Yet at the age of seventeen she left the Blue Devils and married an obscure,
surly trombonist named A 1 Jorden. “From the time I was a little girl,” she says,
“my only true ambition in life was to get married and tend house and have a
family. Singing was just something to do until that time came, and now it was
here.” Though she had known Jorden back in Cincinnati, he surprised her, once
married, with psychopathic behavior that bordered on the murderous. He was
frantically jealous, beat her, begged forgiveness in fits of remorse that became
as repellent as his rage, and demanded she abort the pregnancy that came along
in the second month of the hasty match. Doris Day, as she was by then called,
in rapid succession had the baby (her only child, Terry), divorced Al Jorden,
went back to Les Brown, and recorded “Sentimental Journey,” her first hit
154
Movie Stars
record and the point where I, among millions, began to love her. Unaware of
my feelings, she married another bandman, George Weidler, who played alto
sax; this marriage ended even sooner than the one to Al Jorden, though on a dif¬
ferent note. Weidler, with whom she was contentedly living in a trailer camp
in postwar Los Angeles, told her she was going to become a star and he didn’t
wish to become Mr. Doris Day. She protests even now, “I loved him, or at least
I thought I did, and with all the hardship and struggle I was enjoying my trailer
wifedom.” Nor did Weidler seem to find her wanting. “I could not doubt his
strong desire for me. But I guess his desire not to be Mr. Doris Day was even
stronger, for in the morning we parted, and I knew it would be final.” At this
low ebb, then, homeless, husbandless, and penniless, she permitted herself to
be dragged to a screen test, and was handed the lead in the first of her many suc¬
cessful movies, Romance on the High Seas. She and the cameras fell in love at first
sight:
I found I could enter a room and move easily to my floormark without actually
looking for it. I felt a nice exhilaration at hearing the word “Action!” and then re¬
sponding to the pressure of the rolling camera. It was effortless and thoroughly
enjoyable. . . . From the first take onward, I never had any trepidation about what
I was called on to do. Movie acting came to me with greater ease and naturalness
than anything else I had ever done. ... I never had a qualm. Water off a duck's
back.
Two decades off her back found their high-water mark in the early Sixties,
when she was N o. i at the box office .In 1953, however, she had suffered an in¬
capacitating nervous breakdown, and throughout her moviemaking prime her
personal life was bounded by shyness, Christian Science, a slavish work sched¬
ule, and marriage to a man no one else liked—Marty Melcher. Les Brown is
quoted as saying, “Marty Melcher was an awful man, pushy, grating on the
nerves, crass, money-hungry. He lived off Patty Andrews; then, when Doris
came along and looked like abetter ticket, he glommed onto her.” Sam Weiss,
onetime head of Warner Brothers music, phrases it rather beautifully: “The fact
was that the only thing Marty loved was money. He loved Patty’s money until
Doris’s money came along and then, because there was more of it, he loved
Doris’s money more.” “I put up with Marty,” Weiss further avows, “and every¬
body else endured him, because of Doris. I don’t know anybody who liked
Marty. Not even his own family.”
Her manager as well as her husband, Melcher kept the cameras churning out
sugary Daydreams while the focus got softer and softer, and American audiences
were moving on to skin and rock. In 1968, Doris Day made the last of her thirty-
nine films and Marty Melcher suddenly died; the financial post mortem re¬
vealed that, like many a man in love with money, he could only lose it. Over
John Updike
i JS
the fat years, he had poured her fortune into the schemes of a swindler named
Rosenthal, leaving her a half-million dollars in debt. She bailed herself out by
going ahead, against her inclinations, with a television series Melcher had secretly
signed her to, and put herself through five years of sit-com paces on the little
box. As an additional trauma, her son, Terry, who had evolved into a young pop-
music entrepreneur, was peripherally involved in the Tate-Manson murders and
retreated to a cave of pills and vodka; in an eerie rerun of her childhood acci¬
dent, he broke both legs while carousing on a motorcycle. Now, on the far side
of fifty, Doris Day has no visible career but has kept her celebrity status and her
confidence. “I know that I can handle almost anything they throw at me, and to
me that is real success,” she concludes, cockily.
The particulars of her life surprise us, like graffiti scratched on a sacred
statute. She appears sheer symbol—of a kind of beauty, of a kind of fresh and
energetic innocence, of a kind of banality. Her very name seems to signify less
a person than a product, wrapped in an alliterating aura. She herself, it turns
out, doesn’t like her name, which was given her because “Kappelhoff” didn’t fit
on a marquee. (Her first name, too, has to do with marquees; her mother
named her after a movie star popular in 1924, Doris Kenyon. And in this tra¬
dition Doris named her own son, in 1942, after a favorite comic strip, “Terry
and the Pirates.”) Of her name Doris Day says:
I never did like it. Still don’t. I think it’s a phony name. As a matter of fact, over
the years many of my friends didn’t feel that Doris Day suited me, and gave me
names of their own invention. Billy De Wolfe christened me Clara Bixby . . .
Rock Hudson calls me Eunice . . . and others call me Do-Do, and lately one of
my friends has taken to calling me Suzie Creamcheese.
This shy goddess who avoids parties and live audiences fascinates us with the
amount of space we imagine between her face and her mask. Among the co¬
actors and fellow-musicians who let their words be used in this book, only Kirk
Douglas touches on the mystery: “I haven’t a clue as to who Doris Day really
is. That face that she shows the world—smiling, only talking good, happy,
tuned into God—as far as I’m concerned, that’s just a mask. I haven’t a clue as
to what’s underneath. Doris is just about the remotest person I know.” In a
spunky footnote, she counterattacks—“But then Kirk never makes much of an
effort toward anyone else. He’s pretty much wrapped up in himself”—and the
entire book is announced by her as an attack upon her own image as “Miss
Chastity Belt,” “America’s la-di-da happy virgin!” True, her virginity seems to
have been yielded before she married in her mid-teens, and her tough life shows
in the tough advice she gives her readers. “You don’t really know a person until
you live with him, not just sleep with him. ... I staunchly believe no two peo-
156 Movie Stars
pie should get married until they have lived together. The young people have
it right.” For all her love of marriage, she refused both her early husbands when
they begged to reconcile, and at one point in her marriage to Melcher she
kicked him out, observing simply, “There comes a time when a marriage must
be terminated. Nothing is forever.” She brushes aside Patty Andrews’s belief that
Doris had stolen her husband with the sentence “A person does not leave a good
marriage for someone else,” and of a post-Marty lover she says, “I didn’t care
whether he was married or not. I have no qualms about the other person’s mar¬
ital life.”
How sexy is she, America’s girl next door? Her son, who is full of opinions,
claims, “She has her heart set on getting married again but she really doesn’t have
any idea how to react to a man’s attention. . . . Sad to say, I don’t think my
mother’s had much of a sex life.” But she makes a point of telling us, of each
husband, that their sex life was good, and James Gamer, with whom she made
two of the romantic comedies that followed the great success of Pillow Talk, con¬
fides,
I’ve had to play love scenes with a lot of screen ladies . . . but of all the women
I’ve had to be intimate with on the screen, I’d rate two as sexiest by far—Doris
and Julie Andrews, both of them notorious girls next door. Playing a love scene
with either of them is duck soup because they communicate something sexy
which means I also let myself go somewhat and that really makes a love scene
work. . . . The fact of the matter is that with Doris, one hundred grips or not,
there was always something there and I must admit that if I had not been married
I would have tried to carry forward, after hours, where we left off on the sound
stage.
The fact of this matter is that star quality is an emanation of superabundant ner¬
vous energy and that sexiness, in another setting, would be another emanation.
At the outset of her screen career, the director Michael Curtiz told her (as
she remembers his Hungarian locutions), “No matter what you do on the screen,
no matter what kind of part you play, it will always be you. What I mean is, the
Doris Day will always shine through the part. This will make you big important
star. You listen to me. Is very rare thing. You look Gable acting, Gary Cooper,
Carole Lombard, they are playing different parts but always is the same strong
personality coming through.” The same strong personality behind her profes¬
sional success has no doubt contributed to her personal problems; Al Jorden’s
jealousy, George Weidler’s walkout, and Marty Melcher’s disastrous dealing can
all be construed as attempts of a male ego to survive an overmatch with a queen
bee. Of a recent lover, Miss Day, having sung his praises, rather chillingly con¬
fesses, “But as it turned out, he was a man who passed through my life without
John Updike
i 5 7
leaving a trace of himself.” At about the same time, she passed her second hus¬
band on the street and didn’t recognize him—“The most embarrassing part of
it was that his appearance hadn’t changed very much.” Even at seventeen, she
was the executioner:
“I'm sorry, Al,” I said, “but the feelings I once had for you are dead and gone.
There’s no way to resurrect them. I don’t love you anymore, and without love
it just wouldn’t work. There’s nothing to talk about—the good feelings are
gone, and it’s over. All over.” . . .
As I started to get out of the car, he put his hand on my arm. I looked at him.
His face was full of pain and he was near tears. I thought to myself, No, I am
through comforting you. I felt a curious kind of revulsion.
She longs for the marital paradise, but cannot bring to it that paradise’s customary
component of female dependence.
“How will you get along?” my aunt asked.
“Why I’ll get a job,” I said. All my life I have known that I could work at what¬
ever I wanted whenever I wanted.
And worked she has. Thoroughly German in her ancestry, she is a dedicated tech¬
nician in the industry of romantic illusion. Singing or acting, she manages to pro¬
duce, in her face or in her voice, an “effect,” a skip or a tremor, a feathery edge
that touches us. In these spoken memoirs she seems most herself, least guarded
and most exciting, talking shop—details such as how to avoid popping the “p”s
when singing into a radio microphone (turn the head “slightly to the side”) and
the special difficulties of dancing before movie cameras (“A film dancer does not
have the freedom of a stage dancer. She must dance precisely to a mark. Her
turns must be exact. She must face precisely in the camera direction required
while executing very difficult steps”). Her co-performers praise her technical
mastery; Bob Hope marvels at the “great comedy timing” she brought to their
radio shows, and Jack Lemmon explains why she is a “director’s delight”—“Once
she performs a scene, she locks it in, and no matter how many takes are required,
she gives the same matched performance. In my book, this is the most difficult
part of movie acting.” She never watches rushes, and cannot sit through one of
her old movies without wanting “to redo every shot.” She not only dislikes per¬
forming before a live audience but often records to the prerecorded accompa¬
niment of an absent band. “In the solitude of a room with perfect acoustics, I
could record a song as many times as necessary to get it right.” Melcher’s long
and steady betrayal of her evidently won no worse recrimination than this, after
he had signed her up f or a clunker called Caprice:
Movie Stars
IS 8
“You made a deal—you and Rosenthal, that it? Well, you and Rosenthal don’t have
to get in front of the camera and try to make something out of terrible stuff like
this! I know that you and your friends are only interested in making money, but
I’m interested in something more. I don’t give a damn about money. I never see
any of it and I don’t have the time to use any of it even if I knew what to do with
it—which I don’t.”
She is very much the modem artist in being happiest within her art, a haven from
life:
I really like to sing; it gives me a sense of release, another dimension; it makes
me happy; and I think the people who listen to me instinctively know that and
feel it.
I felt very real in the make-believe parts I had to play. I felt what the script
asked me to feel. I enjoyed playing and singing for the cameras and I guess that
enjoyment came through on the screen. . . . When the camera turned ... I eas¬
ily and rather happily responded to whatever was demanded of me.
That Marty Melcher was pouring her earnings down the sewer of his own greed
mattered less to her than the memory of Al Jorden’s beatings, which she could
conjure up whenever the camera asked her to cry.
The words “Doris Day” get a reaction, often adverse. They are an incantation,
and people who have no reason to disdain her fine entertainer’s gifts shy from
her as a religious force. Her starriness has a challenging, irritating twinkle pe¬
culiar to her—Monroe’s image lulled us like a moon seen from a motel
bed, and there is nothing about Katharine Hepburn’s “goodness” that asks us to
examine our own. On the jacket of Doris Day: Her Own Story the sprightly pho¬
tograph of the heroine uncomfortably reminds us of those tireless, elastic tele¬
vision ladies who exhort us to get up in the morning and do exercises; and the
book ends with a set of exercises that Doris Day does, and that do sound ex¬
hausting. She likes the movie actor’s Spartan regimen, whichbegins at five in the
morning, and more than once she speaks with pleasure of “coming up to the
mark” chalked on the floor of a movie set. For years, she was a professed Chris¬
tian Scientist; but, then, so were Ginger Rogers and Charlotte Greenwood, and
no one held it against them. Miss Day, religiously, is in fact an American Pela¬
gian, an enemy of the despair-prone dualism that has been the intellectual pride
of our Scots Protestants and our Irish Catholics alike. Doris Kappelhoff was raised
as a Catholic, but “the Catholic side of me never took.” She resented the ob¬
scurity of the Latin, and resented even more being asked, at the age of seven,
John Updike
59
to make up sins to confess. “I had my own built-in church. It allowed me to ques¬
tion a lot of Catholic dogma.” She turned to the Church once, after the collapse
of her first marriage, “desperate to find some way to restore the positive view
I had always had toward life.” When the priest told her she had never been re¬
ally married and her son was illegitimate, she walked out. All three of her mar¬
riages have been casual civil ceremonies, and she makes a point of not going to
funerals—not even her father’s. After their divorce, George Weidler (the most
phantasmal and, in a way, most appealing man in her life) interested her in the
teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, and from the first line she read—“To those lean¬
ing on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings”—she met in “words
of gleaming light” a prefigurement of her “own built-in church.” Though in
some of her crises she has consulted doctors, and after Melcher’s death broke
with the organized church, Christian Science’s tenet that “All is infinite Mind”
has remained a sustaining principle. She describes herself sitting outside her son ’ s
hospital room thinking, “I can’t pray to a God to make him well, because there
is no duality, no God outside of Terry. . . . There is but one power, and if that
lovely son of mine is supposed to live, then nothing on this earth can take him.”
The fatalism that goes with monism suits both her toughness and her optimism.
Almost brutally she enlists her misfortunes in the progress of her career: “And
Marty’s death—well, to be honest about it, had he lived I would have been to¬
tally wiped out.” Que sera, sera. Unchastened, she sees her life as an irresistible
blooming:
It is not luck that one seed grows into a purple flower and another, identical seed
grows up to be a yellow flower, nor is it luck that Doris Kappelhoff of Cincin¬
nati grows up to be a sex symbol on the silver screen.
Her sense of natural goodness and universal order gets a little cloying when
extended to her pet dogs, but by and large she speaks of her religious convic¬
tions uninsistently and reasonably, as something that has worked for her. Con¬
cerning others, she has scarcely a judgmental or complaining word. She is rather
a purist but no puritan; her sexual ethics, like her Man-is-Spirit mysticism, are
as Seventies as her image is Fifties. But, then, our movie queens have long been
creating metaphysics for themselves on the frontier where bourgeois norms evap¬
orate. Doris Day is naive, I think, only about her own demon; it was not just by
divine determination that peaceful obscure marriage eluded her and fame did
not. When she had her nervous breakdown, her psychiatrist described her as
“self-demanding.” Her father before her failed as a domestic creature; his “whole
life was music.” She was driven to perform, and permitted life situations to keep
forcing her back on the stage. Now she has felt compelled to give this account
of herself. How much editorial magic A. E. Hotchner sprinkled upon her tapes
6 o
Movie Stars
there is no telling; but the sections of Doris Day ostensibly speaking are rather
better written than Hotchner’s own press-releasy prologue and epilogue. She
can, if we take her words as truly hers, toss off the terms “sanctum sanctorum”
and “reactive,” recall patches of dialogue thirty years old, be quite funny about
a hideous hotel built in her name, and evoke Bob Hope, “the way his teeth take
over his face when he smiles. And the way he swaggers across the stage, kind of
sideways, beaming at the audience, spreading good cheer.” She became a suc¬
cessful comedienne, surely, in part because she is one of the few movie actresses
of her generation whose bearing conveys intelligence.
Now, love must be clear-eyed, and Doris Day’s accomplishment, resilient
and versatile as she is, should not be exaggerated. Though she learned from Ella
Fitzgerald “the subtle ways she shaded her voice, the casual yet clean way she
sang the words,” there are dark sweet places where Ella’s voice goes that her
disciple’s doesn’t. And it was not just Hollywood crassness that cast her in so
many tame, lame vehicles; her Pelagianism makes it impossible for her to be evil,
so the top of her emotional range is an innocent victim’s hysteria. But, as Michael
Curtiz foretold when he prepared her for her first motion picture, the actor’s
art in a case like hers functions as a mere halo of refinements around the “strong
personality.” Her third picture, strange to say, ended with her make-believe mar¬
riage to Errol Flynn. A heavenly match, in the realm where both are lovable.
Both brought to the corniest screen moment a gallant and guileless delight in
being themselves, a faint air of excess, a skillful insouciance that, in those giant
dreams projected across our Saturday nights, hinted at how, if we were angels,
we would behave.
Truman Capote
This is a deceptively simple piece, recording in some detail a few hours that Truman Capote
(1924—1984) spent in the company of Marilyn Monroe. Capote famously claimed that
the quotes in his In Cold Blood were accurate because he had trained himself to remem¬
ber exactly and write down each conversation as soon as possible after having it. Here the
words seem to have the accuracy of a tape recording, yet at the same time they flow in such
a smooth and particular manner that they seem ready to be pe formed in a one-act play.
Truman Capote
i 6 i
Capote’s perfect little piece records not only Monroe’s personality but also, with a certain
objectivity, bis own lifetime role of confidant and confessor to beautiful, insecure women.
“A Beautiful Child”
Time: 28 April 1.
Scene: The chapel of the Universal Funeral Home at Lexington Avenue and Fifty-
second Street, New York City. An interesting galaxy packs the pews: celebri¬
ties, for the most part, from an international arena of theatre, films, literature,
all present in tribute to Constance Collier, the English-born actress who had died
the previous day at the age of seventy-five.
Bora in 1880, Miss Collier had begun her career as a music-hall Gaiety Girl,
graduated from that to become one of England’s principal Shakespearean ac¬
tresses (and the longtime fiancee of Sir Max Beerbohm, whom she never
married, and perhaps for that reason was the inspiration for the mischievously
unobtainable heroine in Sir Max’s novel Zuleika Dobson). Eventually she emi¬
grated to the United States, where she established herself as a considerable fig¬
ure on the New York stage as well as in Hollywood films. During the last
decades of her life she lived in New York, where she practiced as a drama coach
of unique caliber; she accepted only professionals as students, and usually only
professionals who were already “stars”—Katharine Hepburn was a permanent
pupil; another Hepburn, Audrey, was also a Collier protegee, as were Vivien
Leigh and, for a few months prior to her death, a neophyte Miss Collier referred
to as “my special problem,” Marilyn Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe, whom I’d met through John Huston when he was direct¬
ing her in her first speaking role in The Asphalt Jungle, had come under Miss Col¬
lier’s wingat my suggestion. I had known Miss Collier perhaps a half-dozen years,
and admired her as a woman of true stature, physically, emotionally, creatively;
and, for all her commanding manner, her grand cathedral voice, as an adorable
person, mildly wicked but exceedingly warm, dignified yet Gemiitlich. I loved
to go to the frequent small lunch parties she gave in her dark Victorian studio
in mid-Manhattan; she had a barrel of yams to tell about her adventures as a lead¬
ing lady opposite Sir Beerbohm Tree and the great French actor Coquelin, her
involvements with Oscar Wilde, the youthful Chaplin, and Garbo in the silent
Swede’s formative days. Indeed she was a delight, as was her devoted secretary
and companion, Phyllis Wilboum, a quietly twinkling maiden lady who, after
her employer’s demise, became, and has remained, the companion of Katharine
Hepburn. Miss Collier introduced me to many people who became friends: the
Movie Stars
i 62
Lunts, the Oliviers, and especially Aldous Huxley. But it was I who introduced
her to Marilyn Monroe, and at first it was not an acquaintance she was too keen
to acquire: her eyesight was faulty, she had seen none of Marilyn’s movies, and
really knew nothing about her except that she was some sort of platinum sex-
explosion who had achieved global notoriety; in short, she seemed hardly suit¬
able clay for Miss Collier’s stern classic shaping. But I thought they might make
a stimulating combination.
They did. “Oh yes,” Miss Collier reported to me, “there is something there.
She is a beautiful child. I don’t mean that in the obvious way—the perhaps too
obvious way. I don’t think she’s an actress at all, not in any traditional sense.
What she has—this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence—
could never surface on the stage. It’s so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught
by the camera. It’s like a hummingbird in flight: only a camera can freeze the
poetry of it. But anyone who thinks this girl is simply another Harlow or harlot
or whatever is mad. Speaking of mad, that’s what we’ve been working on to¬
gether: Ophelia. I suppose people would chuckle at the notion, but really, she
could be the most exquisite Ophelia. I was talking to Greta last week, and I told
her about Marilyn’s Ophelia, and Greta said yes, she could believe that because
she had seen two of her films, very bad and vulgar stuff, but nevertheless she
had glimpsed Marilyn’s possibilities. Actually, Greta has an amusing idea. You
know that she wants to make a film of Dorian Gray? W ith her playing Dorian, of
course. Well, she said she would like to have Marilyn opposite her as one of the
girls Dorian seduces and destroys. Greta! So unused! Such a gift—and rather
like Marilyn’s, if you consider it. Of course, Greta is a consummate artist, an
artist of the utmost control. This beautiful child is without any concept of dis¬
cipline or sacrifice. Somehow I don’t think she’ll make old bones. Absurd of me
to say, but somehow I feel she’ll go young. I hope, I really pray, that she sur¬
vives long enough to free the strange lovely talentthat’s wandering through her
like a jailed spirit.”
But now Miss Collier had died, and here I was loitering in the vestibule of
the Universal Chapel waiting for Marilyn; we had talked on the telephone the
evening before, and agreed to sit together at the services, which were sched¬
uled to start at noon. She was now a half-hour late; she was always late, but I’d
thought just for once! For God’s sake, goddamnit! Then suddenly there she was,
and I didn’t recognize her until she said . . .
Marilyn: Oh, baby, I’m so sorry. But see, I got all made up, and then I decided
maybe I shouldn’t wear eyelashes or lipstick or anything, so then I had to
wash all that off, and I couldn’t imagine what to wear . . .
(What she had imagined to wear would have been appropriatejor the abbess of a nunnery
in private audience with the Pope. Her hair was entirely concealed by a black chiffon scarf
Truman Capote
163
herblack dress wasloose and long and looked somehow borrowed; black silk stockings dulled
the blond sheen of her slender legs. An abbess, one can be certain, would not have donned
the vaguely erotic black high-heeled shoes she had chosen, or the owlish black sunglasses
that dramatized the vanilla-pallor of her dairy fresh skin.)
TO: You look fine.
Marilyn (gnawing an already chewed-to-the-nub thumbnail): Are you sure? I
mean, I’m so jumpy. Where’s the john? If I could just pop in there for a
minute—
TC: And pop a pill? No! Shhh. That’s Cyril Ritchard’s voice: he’s started the
eulogy.
(Tiptoeing, we entered the crowded chapel and wedged ourselves into a narrow space in
the last row. Cyril Rite hardfinished; he wasfollowed by Cathleen Nesbitt, a lifelong col¬
league of Miss Collier’s, andfinally Brian Aherne addressed the mourners. Through it all,
my date periodically removed her spectacles to scoop up tears bubbling from her blue-grey
eyes. I’d sometimes seen her without makeup, but today she presented a new visual expe¬
rience, a face I’d not observed before, and at first 1 couldn’t perceive why this should be.
Ah! It was because of the obscuring head scarf With her tresses invisible, and her com¬
plexion cleared of all cosmetics, she looked twelve years old, a pubescent virgin who has
just been admitted to an orphanage and is grieving over her plight. At last the ceremony
ended, and the congregation began to disperse.)
Marilyn: Please, let’s sit here. Let’s wait till everyone’s left.
TC: Why?
Marilyn: I don’t want to have to talk to anybody. I never know what to say.
TC: Then you sit here, and I’ll wait outside. I’ve got to have a cigarette.
Marilyn: You can’t leave me alone! My God! Smoke here.
TC: Here? In the chapel?
Marilyn: Why not? What do you want to smoke? A reefer?
TC: Very funny. Come on, let’s go.
Marilyn: Please. There’s a lot of shutterbugs downstairs. And I certainly don’t
want them taking my picture looking like this.
TC: I can’t blame you for that.
Marilyn: You said I looked fine.
TC: You do. Just perfect—if you were playing the Bride of Frankenstein.
Marilyn: Now you’re laughing at me.
TC: Do I look like I’m laughing?
Marilyn: You’re laughing inside. And that’s the worst kind of laugh. (Frown¬
ing; nibbling thumbnail) Actually, I could’ve worn makeup. I see all these
other people are wearing makeup.
64 Movie Stars
TC: I am. Globs.
Marilyn: Seriously, though. It’s my hair. I need color. And I didn’t have time
to get any. It was all so unexpected, Miss Collier dying and all. See?
(She lifted her kerchif slightly to display a fringe of darkness where her hair parted.)
TC: Poor innocent me. And all this time I thought you were a bona-fide blonde.
Marilyn: I am. But nobody’s that natural. And incidentally, fuck you.
TC: Okay, everybody’s cleared out. So up, up.
Marilyn: Those photographers are still down there. I know it.
TC: If they didn’t recognize you coming in, they won’t recognize you going
out.
Marilyn: One of them did. But I’d slipped through the door before he started
yelling.
TC: I’m sure there’s a back entrance. We can go that way.
Marilyn : I don’t want to see any corpses.
TC: Why would we?
Marilyn: This is a funeral parlor. They must keep them somewhere. That’s all
I need today, to wander into a room full of corpses. Be patient. I’ll take
us somewhere and treat us to a bottle of bubbly.
(So we sat and talked and Marilyn said: "1 hatefunerals. I’m glad I won’t have to go to
my own. Only, 1 don’t want a funeral—just my ashes cast on waves by one of my kids, if
1 ever have any. I wouldn’t have come today except Miss Collier cared about me, my wel¬
fare, and she was just like a granny, a tough old granny, but she taught me a lot. She
taught me how to breathe. I’ve put it to good use, too, and 1 don’t mean just acting. There
are other times when breathing is a problem. But when 1 first heard about it, Miss Col¬
lier cooling, the first thing I thought was: Oh, gosh, what’s going to happen to Phyllis?!
Her whole life was Miss Collier. But I hear she’s going to live with Miss Hepburn. Lucky
Phyllis; she’s going to have fun now. I’d change places with her pronto. Miss Hepburn is
a terrific lady, no shit. 1 wish she was my friend. So 1 could call her up sometimes and
. . . well, 1 don’t know, just call her up. ”
We talked about how much we liked New York and loathed Los Angeles ("Even though
1 was born there, 1 still can’t think of one good thing to say about it. If I close my eyes,
and picture L.A., all 1 see is one big varicose vein’); we talked about actors and acting
(“Everybody says 1 can’t act. They said the same thing about Elizabeth Taylor. And they
were wrong. She was great in A Place in the Sun. I’ll never get the right part, anything
1 really want. My looks are against me. They’re too spec fie); we talked some more about
Elizabeth Taylor, and she wanted to know if I knew her, and 1 saidyes, and shesaid well,
what is she like, what is she really like, and 1 said well, she’s a little bit like you, she
wears her heart on her sleeve and talks salty, and Marilyn said fuck you and said well, if
Truman Capote
i6<r
somebody asked me what Marilyn Monroe was like, what was Marilyn Monroe really like,
what would I say, and 1 said I’d have to think about that.)
TC: No w do you think we can get the hell out of here? You promised me cham -
pagne, remember?
MARILYN: I remember. But I don’t have any money.
TC: You’re always late and you never have any money. By any chance are you
under the delusion that you’re Queen Elizabeth?
MARILYN: Who?
TC: Queen Elizabeth. The Queen of England.
Marilyn (frowning): What’s that cunt got to do with it?
TC: Queen Elizabeth never carries money either. She’s not allowed to. Filthy
lucre must not stain the royal palm. It’s a law or something.
Marilyn: I wish they’d pass a law like that for me.
TC: Keep going the way you are and maybe they will.
Marilyn: Well, gosh. How does she pay for anything? Like when she goes shop¬
ping.
TC: Her lady-in-waiting trots along with a bag full of farthings.
Marilyn: You know what? I’ll bet she gets everything free. In return for en¬
dorsements.
TC: Very possible. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. By Appointment to Her
Majesty. Corgi dogs. All those Fortnum & Mason goodies. Pot. Con¬
doms.
Marilyn: What would she want with condoms?
TC: Not her, dopey. For that chump who walks two steps behind. Prince
Philip.
Marilyn: Him. Oh, yeah. He’s cute. He looks like he might have a nice prick.
Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Errol Flynn whip out his prick and
play the piano with it? Oh well, it was a hundred years ago, I’d just got
into modeling, and I went to this half-ass party, and Errol Flynn, so pleased
with himself, he was there and he took out his prick and played the piano
with it. Thumped the keys. He played You Are My Sunshine. Christ! Every¬
body says Milton Berle has the biggest schlong in Hollywood. But who
cares? Look, don’t you have any money?
TC: Maybe about fifty bucks.
Marilyn: Well, that ought to buy us some bubbly.
(Outside, Lexington A venue was empty of all but harmless pedestrians. It was around two,
and as nice an April afternoon as one could wish: ideal strolling weather. So we moseyed
toward Third Avenue. A few gawkers spun their heads, not because they recognized Mar¬
ilyn as the Marilyn, but because of herfunereal finery; she giggled her special little gig-
i 66
Movie Stars
gle, a sound as tempting as the jingling bells on a Good Humor wagon, and said: “Maybe
I should always dress this way. Real anonymous. ”
As we neared P. J. Clarke’s saloon, 1 suggested P.J. ’s might be a good place to refresh
ourselves, but she vetoed that: “It’sfull of those advertising creeps. And that bitch Dorothy
Kilgallen, she’s always in there getting bombed. What is it with these micks? The way
they booze, they’re worse than Indians. ’’
I felt called upon to defend Kilgallen, who was a friend, somewhat, and 1 allowed as
to how she could upon occasion be a clever funny woman. She said: "Be that as it may,
she’s written some bitchy stiff about me. But all those cunts hate me. Hedda. Louella. I
know you’re supposed to get used to it, but I just can’t. It really hurts. What did 1 ever
do to those hags? The only one who writes a decent word about me is Sidney Skolsky. But
he’s a guy. The guys treat me okay. Just like maybe 1 was a human person. At least they
give me the ben fit of the doubt. And Bob Thomas is a gentleman. And Jack O’Brian.’’
We looked in the windows of antique shops; one contained a tray of old rings, and Mar¬
ilyn said: ‘That’s pretty. The garnet with the seed pearls. I wish I could wear rings, but
I hate people to notice my hands. They’re too fat. Elizabeth Taylor has fat hands. But
with those eyes, who’s looking at her hands? 1 like to dance naked in front of mirrors and
watch my titties jump around. There’s nothing wrong with them. But I wish my hands
weren't so fat. ”
Another window displayed a handsome grandfather clock, which prompted her to ob¬
serve: “I’ve never had a home. Not a real one with all my own furniture. But if 1 ever get
married again, and make a lot of money, I’m going to hire a couple of trucks and ride
down Third Avenue buying every damn kind of crazy thing. I’m going to get a dozen grand¬
father clocks and line them all up in one room and have them all ticking away at the same
time. That would be real homey, don’t you think?”)
Marilyn: Hey! Across the street!
TC: What?
Marilyn : See the sign with the palm? That must be a fortunetelling parlor.
TC: Are you in the mood for that?
Marilyn: Well, let’s take a look.
(It was not an inviting establishment. Through a smeared window wecould discern a bar¬
ren room with a skinny, hairy gypsy lady seated in a canvas chair under a hellfire-red
ceiling lamp that shed a torturous glow; she was knitting a pair of baby-booties, and did
not return our stares. Nevertheless, Marilyn started to go in, then changed her mind.)
Marilyn: Sometimes I want to know what’s going to happen. Then I think it’s
better notto. There’s two things I’d like to know, though. Oneis whether
I’m going to lose weight.
TC: And the other?
Truman Capote
67
Marilyn: That’s a secret.
TC: Now, now. We can’t have secrets today. Today is a day of sorrow, and
sorrowers share their innermost thoughts.
Marilyn: Well, it’s a man. There’s something I’d like to know. But that’s all
I’m going to tell. It really is a secret.
(And 1 thought: That’s what you think; I’ll get it out of you.)
TC: I’m ready to buy that champagne.
(We wound up on Second Avenue in a gaudily decorated deserted Chinese restaurant. But
it did have a well-stocked bar, and we ordered a bottle of Mumm’s; it arrived unchilled,
and without a bucket, so we drank it out of tall glasses with ice cubes.)
Marilyn : This is fun. Kind of like being on location—if you like location. Which
I most certainly don’t. Niagara. That stinker. Yuk.
TC: So let’s hear about your secret lover.
Marilyn: (Silence)
TC: (Silence)
MARILYN: (Giggles)
TC: (Silence)
Marilyn: You know so many women. Who’s the most attractive woman you
know?
TC: No contest. Barbara Paley. Hands down.
Marilyn (frowning): Is that the one they call “Babe”? She sure doesn’t look like
any Babe to me. I’ve seen her in Vogue and all. She’s so elegant. Lovely.
Just looking at her pictures makes me feel like pig-slop.
TC: She might be amused to hear that. She’s very jealous of you.
Marilyn: Jealous of me? Now there you go again, laughing.
TC: Not at all. She is jealous.
MARILYN: But why?
TC: Because one of the columnists, Kilgallen I think, ran a blind item that said
something like: “Rumor hath it that Mrs. DiMaggio rendezvoused with
television’s toppest tycoon and it wasn’t to discuss business.” Well, she
read the item and she believes it.
MARILYN: Believes what?
TC: That her husband is having an affair with you. William S. Paley. TV’s
toppest tycoon. He’s partial to shapely blondes. Brunettes, too.
Marilyn: But that’s batty. I’ve never met the guy.
TC: Ah, come on. You can level with me. This secret lover of yours—it’s
William S. Paley, n’est-ce pas?
16 8
Movie Stars
Marilyn: No! It’s a writer. He’s a writer.
TC: That’s more like it. Now we’re getting somewhere. So your lover is a
writer. Must be a real hack, or you wouldn’t be ashamed to tell me his
name.
Marilyn (furious, frantic): What does the “S” stand for?
TC: “S.” What “S”?
Marilyn: The “S” in William S. Paley.
TC: Oh, that “S.” It doesn’t stand for anything. He sort of tossed it in there for
appearance sake.
Marilyn: It’s just an initial with no name behind it? My goodness. Mr. Paley must
be a little insecure.
TC: He twitches a lot. But let’s get back to our mysterious scribe.
Marilyn: Stop it! You don’t understand. I have so much to lose.
TC: Waiter, we’ll have another Mumm’s, please.
Marilyn: Are you trying to loosen my tongue?
TC: Yes. Tell you what. We’ll make an exchange. I’ll tell you a story, and if
you think it’s interesting, then perhaps we can discuss your writer friend.
Marilyn (tempted, but reluctant): What’s your story about?
TC: Errol Flynn.
Marilyn: (Silence)
TC: (Silence)
Marilyn (hating herself): Well, go on.
TC: Remember what you were saying about Errol? How pleased he was with
his prick? I can vouch for that. We once spent a cozy evening together. If
you follow me.
Marilyn: You’re making this up. You’re trying to trick me.
TC: Scout’s honor. I’m dealing from a clean deck. (Silence; but I can see that
she’s hooked, so after lighting a cigarette . . .) Well, this happened when
I was eighteen. Nineteen. It was during the war. The winter of 1943. That
night Carol Marcus or maybe she was already Carol Saroyan, was giving
a party for her best friend, Gloria Vanderbilt. She gave it in her mother’s
apartment on Park Avenue. Big party. About fifty people. Around mid¬
night Errol Flynn rolls in with his alter ego, a swashbuckling playboy
named Freddie McEvoy. They were both pretty loaded. Anyway, Errol
started yakking with me, and he was bright, we were making each other
laugh, and suddenly he said he wanted to go to El Morocco, and did I want
to go with him and his buddy McEvoy. I said okay, but then McEvoy didn’t
want to leave the party and all those debutantes, so in the end Errol and I
left alone. Only we didn’t go to El Morocco. We took a taxi down to
Gramercy Park, where I had a little one-room apartment. He stayed until
noon the next day.
Truman Capote
i 69
Marilyn: And how would you rate it? On a scale of one to ten.
TC: Frankly, if it hadn’t been Errol Flynn, I don’t think I would have remem¬
bered it.
Marilyn: That’s not much of a story. Not worth mine—not by a long shot.
TC: Waiter, where is our champagne? You’ve got two thirsty people here.
Marilyn: And it’s not as if you’d told me anything new. I’ve always known Errol
zigzagged. I have a masseur, he’s practically my sister, and he was Tyrone
Power’s masseur, and he told me all about the thing Errol and Ty Power
had going. No, you’ll have to do better than that.
TC: You drive a hard bargain.
Marilyn: I’m listening. So let’s hear your best experience. Along those lines.
TC: The best? The most memorable? Suppose you answer the question first.
MARILYN: And/drive hard bargains! Ha! (Swallowing champagne) Joe’snotbad.
He can hit home runs. If that’s all it takes, we’d still be married. I still love
him, though. He’s genuine.
TC: Husbands don’t count. Not in this game.
Marilyn (nibbling nail; really thinking): Well, I met a man, he’s related to Gary
Cooper somehow. A stockbroker, and nothing much to look at—sixty-
five, and he wears those very thick glasses. Thick as jellyfish. I can’t say
what it was, but—
TC: You can stop right there. I’ve heard all about him from other girls. That
old swordsman really scoots around. His name is Paul Shields. He’s Rocky
Cooper’s stepfather. He’s supposed to be sensational.
Marilyn: He is. Okay, smart-ass. Your turn.
TC: Forget it. I don’t have to tell you damn nothing. Because I know who you
masked marvel is: Arthur Miller. (She lowered her black glasses: Oh boy,
if looks could kill, wow!) I guessed as soon as you said he was a writer.
Marilyn (stammering): But how? I mean, nobody ... I mean, hardly any-
TC: At least three, maybe four years ago Irving Drutman—
Marilyn: Irving who?
TC: Drutman. He’s a writer on the Herald Tribune. He told me you were fool¬
ing around with Arthur Miller. Had a hang-up on him. I was too much of
a gentleman to mention it before.
Marilyn: Gentleman! You bastard. (Stammering again, but dark glasses in place)
You don’t understand. That was long ago. That ended. But this is new.
It’s all different now, and—
TC: Just don’t forget to invite me to the wedding.
Marilyn: If you talk about this, I’ll murder you. I’ll have you bumped off. I know
a couple of men who’d gladly do me the favor.
TC: I don’t question that for an instant.
170
Movie Stars
(At last the waiter returned with the second bottle.)
Marilyn: Tell him to take it back. I don’t want any. I want to get the hell out of
here.
TC: Sorry ifl’ve upset you.
Marilyn: I’m not upset.
(But she was. While I paid the check, she left for the powder room, and 1 wished I had a
book to read: her visits to powder rooms sometimes lasted as long as an elephant’s preg¬
nancy. Idly, as time ticked by, 1 wondered if she was popping uppers or downers. Down¬
ers, no doubt. There was a newspaper on the bar, and I picked it up; it was written in
Chinese. After twenty minutes had passed, I decided to investigate. Maybe she’d popped
a lethal dose, or even cut her wrists. 1 found the ladies’ room, and knocked on the door.
She said: "Come in. ’’Inside, she was confronting a dimly lit mirror. 1 said: "What are you
doing?’’ She said: "Looking at Her.’’ In fact, she was coloring her lips with ruby lipstick.
Also, she had removed the somber head scarf and combed out her glossy fine-as-cotton-
candy hair.)
Marilyn: I hope you have enough money left.
TC: That depends. Not enough to buy pearls, if that’s your idea of making
amends.
Marilyn (giggling, returned to good spirits. I decided I wouldn’t mention Arthur
Miller again): No. Only enough for a long taxi ride.
TC: Where are we going—Hollywood?
Marilyn: Hell, no. A place I like. You’ll find out when we get there.
(1 didn ’t have to wait that long, for as soon as we had fagged a taxi, 1 heard her instruct
the cabby to drive to the South Street Pier, and 1 thought: Isn’t that where one takes the
ferry to Staten Island? And my next conjecture was: She’s swallowed pills on top of that
champagne and now she’s off her rocker.)
TC: I hope we’re not going on any boat rides. I didn’t pack my Dramamine.
Marilyn (happy, giggling): Just the pier.
TC: May I ask why?
Marilyn: I like it there. It smells foreign, and I can feed the seagulls.
TC: With what? You haven’t anything to feed them.
Marilyn: Yes, I do. My purse is full of fortune cookies. I swiped them from that
restaurant.
TC (kidding her): Uh-huh. While you were in the john I cracked one open.
The slip inside was a dirty joke.
Marilyn: Gosh. Dirty fortune cookies?
TC: I’m sure the gulls won’t mind.
Truman Capote
i 7 i
(Our route carried us through the Bowery. Tiny pawnshops and blood-donor stations and
dormitories withfifty-cent cots and tiny grim hotels with dollar beds and bars for whites,
bars Jot blacks, everywhere bums, bums, young, far from young, ancient, bums squatting
curbside, squatting amid shattered glass and pukey debris, bums slanting in doorways and
huddled like penguins at street corners. Once, when we paused for a red light, a purple-
nosed scarecrow weaved toward us and began swabbing the taxi’s windshield with a wet
rag clutched in a shaking hand. Our protesting driver shouted Italian obscenities.)
Marilyn: What is it? What’s happening?
TC: He wants a tip for cleaning the window.
Marilyn (shielding her face with her purse): How horrible! I can’t stand it. Give
him something. Hurry. Please!
(But the taxi had already zoomed ahead, damn near knocking down the old lush. Mari¬
lyn was crying.)
I’m sick.
TC: You want to go home?
Marilyn: Everything’s ruined.
TC: I’ll take you home.
Marilyn: Give me a minute. I’ll be okay.
(Thus we traveled on to South Street, and indeed the sight of a ferry moored there, with
the Brooklyn skyline across the water and careening, cavorting seagulls white against a
marine horizon streaked with thin feecy cloudsfragile as lace—this tableau soon soothed
her soul.
As we got out of the taxi we saw a man with a chow on a leash, a prospective passen¬
ger, walking toward the ferry, and as we passed thetn, my companion stopped to pat the
dog's head.)
the man (firm, but not unfriendly): You shouldn’t touch strange dogs. Espe¬
cially chows. They might bite you.
Marilyn: Dogs never bite me. Just humans. What’s his name?
the man: Fu Manchu.
Marilyn (giggling): Oh, just like the movie. That’s cute.
the man: What’s yours?
Marilyn: My name? Marilyn.
the man: That’s what I thought. My wife will never believe me. Can I have your
autograph?
(He produced a business card and a pen; using her purse to write on, she wrote: God Bless
You—Marilyn Monroe)
Movie Stars
1 7 2
Marilyn: Thank you.
the man: Thank you. Wait’ll I show this back at the office.
(We continued to the edge of the pier, and listened to the water sloshing against it.)
MARILYN: I used to ask for autographs. Sometimes I still do. Last year Clark
Gable was sitting next to me in Chasen’s, and I asked him to sign my
napkin.
(Leaning against a mooring stanchion, she presented a profile: Galatea surveying uncon¬
quered distances. Breezes fufjed her hair, and her head turned toward me with an ethe¬
real ease, as though a breeze had swiveled it.)
TC: So when do we feed the birds? I’m hungry, too. It’s late, and we never
had lunch.
Marilyn : Remember, I said if anybody ever asked you what I was like, what Mar¬
ilyn Monroe was really like—well, how would you answer them? (Her
tone was teaseful, mocking, yet earnest, too: she wanted an honest reply)
I bet you’d tell them I was a slob. A banana split.
TC: Of course. But I’d also say . . .
(The light was leaving. She seemed to fade with it, blend with the sky and clouds, recede
beyond them. 1 wanted to lft my voice louder than the seagulls’ cries and call her back:
Marilyn! Marilyn, why did everything have to turn out the way it did? Why does life have
to be so fucking rotten?)
TC: I’d say . . .
Marilyn: I can’t hear you.
TC: I’d say you are a beautiful child.
Eleanor Coppola
‘73
Eleanor Coppola
Eleanor Coppola made a journal, tape recordings and a 16 mm documentary film on the
Philippines locations of her husband’s Apocalypse Now, one of the most legendary and
beleaguered shoots in film history. Here she recalls herfirst meeting on the set with Mar¬
lon Brando, who had been brought in to anchor the final act as the shadowy Kurtz. Eleanor
Coppola’s video and tape record was also used in an extraordinary documentary, Hearts
of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, by George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr, in
which you can hear Coppola despairing that he has no idea what to do next and the en¬
tirefilm seems to be coming apart. In the end it became one of the greatest films of the
century.
from Notes
September 2, Pagsanjan
I went to the French plantation set to see how Francis was doing and how the
boys were holding up. The shot was down on the dock, so I walked down there
and found Francis in the shade talking to a heavyset man with short gray hair.
When I got closer, the man said, “Hi, Ellie.” He looked familiar and then I re¬
alized that he was Marlon Brando. I was fascinated that he recognized me and
knew my name after such brief meetings. He seemed to be looking at me in mi¬
croscopic detail. As if he noticed my eyebrows move slightly, or could see the
irregular stitching on the buttonhole of my shirt pocket. Not in a judgmental
way, just in a complete absorption of all the details.
Later, Francis was telling me that is part of what makes him such a great actor.
He develops a fix, a vision of a character, down to the most minute detail. Fran¬
cis has a more conceptual vision. He has the overall idea of how he wants the
film to be and he counts on Dean and Vittorio and the actors to fill in many of
the details.
74
Movie Stars
September 4, Pagsanjan
Marlon is very overweight. Francis and he are struggling with how to change
the character in the script. Brando wants to camouflage his weight and Francis
wants to play him as a man eating all the time and overindulging.
I heard there are some real cadavers in body bags at the Kurtz Compound set.
I asked the propman about it; he said, “The script says ‘a pile of burning bod¬
ies’; it doesn’t say a pile of burning dummies.”
This morning Francis was talking about the Kurtz set being so big that there
seemed to be no way to get it all in the frame. The only way to get it was per¬
haps to come in close and look at specific portions to give a sense of the whole.
In a way, that is the same problem he is facing in the script. The ideas of what
Kurtz represents are so big that when you try to get a handle on them they are
almost undefinable. He has to define the specifics to give a sense of the whole.
The production reflects the same thing. It is so big it only seems to make sense
in specific ways. Today I have been thinking that the only way that I can show
the enormity of the making of Apocalypse Now is by showing the details and hop¬
ing they give a sense of the larger picture.
Francis came home tonight really excited after his long talk with Marlon. He
said that Marlon was really incredible. The greatest actor he has ever met, ex¬
tremely hardworking. Brando had improvised all day. Going one way, then
going another, never quitting. They had toughed it out until they came up with
a way to go with his character. Brando was going to do something he had never
tried before. He was going to play a bigger-than-life character, a mythical fig¬
ure, a theatrical personage. He is the master of the natural, realistic performance
and he was going to go for a different style of acting for the first time in his ca¬
reer. They haven’t quite worked out all the details. It will have to be refined
over the next few days, but Francis is really excited and he says Marlon is, too.
September Pagsanjan
Late in the afternoon I was standing on the main steps of the temple with Fran¬
cis and Marlon. The two of them were talking about Kurtz. Francis had asked
Marlon to reread Heart of Darkness. Now Marlon was saying how his character
Eleanor Coppola
ns
should be more like Kurtz was in the book. Francis said, “Yes, that’s what I’ve
been trying to tell you. Don’t you remember, last spring, before you took the
part, when you read Heart of Darkness and we talked?”
Marlon said, “I lied. I never read it.”
September 8, Pagsanjan
Francis got up at four this morning and went down to his room to write. About
six he came into the bedroom and woke me up. He had just figured out why he
hasn’t been able to resolve the ending of the script. He has been struggling for
over a year now, with different drafts of the end, trying to get it right. He said
he just realized that there was no simple solution to the script. Just as there was
no simple right answer as to why we were in Vietnam. Every time he tried to
take the script one direction or the other, he met up with a fundamental con¬
tradiction, because the war was a contradiction. A human being contains con¬
tradictions. Only if we admit the truth about ourselves, completely, can we find
a balance point between the contradictions, the love and the hate, the peace and
the violence which exist within us.
We were talking for a long time and it was getting late, so I got dressed. We
had some coffee and rode out to the set. It was eight thirty and Marlon was sup¬
posed to be there at eight. The assistant director was saying, “What shall we do?
We’ve never worked with Brando before, shall we send another car for him, or
how shall we handle it?” Francis said that Marlon would probably be late the first
few days.
It seemed to me that Francis thought Marlon was late because the part was
still not clearly defined in his mind. Finally, Marlon came around ten and he and
Francis went to sit in his houseboat dressing room to talk it out.
At one in the afternoon, the company wrapped for the day and the cast and
crew were sent home. Francis is still
evening now.
talking in there and it’s past seven in the
September 14, Pagsanjan
When I got to the set around nine in the evening, the whole crew was wait¬
ing. Francis, Marlon and Marty were down on the houseboat talking. The
crew had been standing by for about four hours. The propman got a basket of
chocolate candy from his truck and passed it around. It had come from the
States. The candy kisses I had were sort of that light color chocolate gets when
it is old. Sitting there in the damp temple set, that didn’t seem to matter to
176 Movie Stars
anybody. Finally, at 11 :oo p.m., the first assistant called a wrap and everybody
went home.
Just as I was going to the car, there was a radio message that Francis wanted
me to wait for him. I walked down the path near Marlon’s houseboat dressing
room. The bodyguards and drivers and the wardrobe and makeup people were
waiting for Francis and Marlon and Marty. We stood around and talked for about
an hour and then the wardrobe and makeup men went home. It was starting to
rain again, so I decided to go down to the boat and interrupt them and see if I
couldn’t get them to finish up. I was really sleepy and my clothes were wet and
soggy. When I got to the houseboat, I thought for a moment maybe they were
asleep or gone. The light was low and I couldn’t see anyone. They were down
in the back, sitting by the table. When I went in, I felt like I was slicing into their
conversation. The air was like a solid mass of words. I started to wake up im¬
mediately. I sat down next to Marlon on the couch, only I miscalculated and sat
halfway on a tray of leftover dinner. I never do those kinds of things. Being in
Marlon’s presence is not natural. I do things or say things that I wouldn’t ordi¬
narily. What a burden it must be for him to hardly have anyone who feels com¬
pletely natural around him.
September 16, Pagsanjan
Last night Francis climbed up a scaffolding onto a lighting platform and just lay
there. It was raining lightly, and when I climbed up, it was wet with standing
puddles on top. He was about as miserable as I have ever seen him. It was his
ultimate nightmare. He was on this huge set of this huge production with every
asset mortgaged against the outcome; hundreds of crew members were wait¬
ing. Brando was due on the set and he was delaying because he didn’t like the
scene, and Francis hadn’t been able to write a scene that Marlon thought was
really right. The ultimate actor on the ultimate set of the ultimate production
with the ultimate cinematographer, and Francis with no scene to play. He kept
saying, “Let me out of here, let me just quit and go home. I can’t do it. I can’t
see it. If I can’t see it, I can’t do anything. This is like an opening night; the cur¬
tain goes up and there is no show.”
Vittorio came out from the interior of the temple where he was lighting and
said, “Look, Francis, I think we can do something. I have made some strange
light and smoke and I think you can do something.” Finally Francis dragged him¬
self back inside. Marlon came and they began doing an improvisation and shoot¬
ing that. After the third take, it was midnight and they wrapped.
Francis was starting to feel better. It seemed to me that what was getting him
down was that his talent is the ability to discriminate, the ability to see a mo-
Eleanor Coppola
177
ment of truthful acting and distinguish it from all the others. Since Brando
hadn’t started to work, there was nothing for Francis to use to lead him to the
next moment and the next. As soon as Brando started to improvise, Francis could
begin to direct, that is, see the direction the scene should go. Today he wrote
a scene based on the improvisation. He is starting to see it.
September 21, Pagsanjan
I am in the kitchen. Sofia is making a pizza out of play dough. She is painting
chunks yellow for cheese, red for tomatoes and green for peppers. The flour
has weevils in it. I guess it’s been in the canister since Manila. Now and then a
groggy weevil gets up out of one of the pieces and walks off across the tray.
Francis, Marlon and Marty are in the living room talking about today’s scene.
I just brought Marty some coffee. I thought about women’s lib. Here I am in
the kitchen with the kid, making coffee.
I can hear parts of the conversation coming from the other room. “Don’t you
see, Kurtz is caught in this conflict of...” A truck just passed by, the chickens
are crowing next door and the landlord’s radio is blaring, Glen Campbell is
singing “I’m a Rhinestone Cowboy.”
September 29, Pagsanjan
I am sitting on a rock on the set. It feels like a rock, it looks like a temple frag¬
ment, but I know it was made by the art department. The crew has been wait¬
ing since 8: o o A. M. to shoot. It is almost three in the afternoon now. Francis and
Marlon have been down in his houseboat, working out his death scene today,
and most of yesterday. The assistant director is saying that if they don’t start
shooting in the next thirty minutes, it will be too late to get a shot today: “Eighty
thousand dollars down the drain.”
October 8
This is the last day that Marlon works. The shot is outside by the CONEX con¬
tainer. This morning it was warm and sort of tropical and balmy, not miserably
hot. Francis and Marlon were talking out the scene. I got a couple of shots of
them at a distance, sitting outside an Ifugao house, deep in discussion. It started
to rain and everybody began to cover equipment. Now it is pouring. Francis and
Marlon and Marty are crouched under an Ifugao house. I am sitting under a light-
78
Movie Stars
ing reflector, quite comfortably. Some of my equipment got wet before I could
get it covered. The crew is all huddled in little bunches under things. Bill and
Jimmy Keane are under here with me. We’ve been talking about the Metro¬
politan Museum of Art. Jimmy was an elevator operator at the hotel where we
stay in New York. He is talking about all the famous people he met who came
to the hotel while he worked there. He said his favorite was Frank Capra, the
director. “A little fellow, well over four feet.”
I can see some big hunks of clear sky across the river. I can imagine Francis’s
tension, sitting out the rain when this is the last day Marlon works and there is
a scene left to get.
I am listening to the sound of the rain hitting the reflector and watching all
the little dramas of the other groups of people huddled together. The Italians
started a dice game under the umbrella with the arc light. The prop- and
wardrobe men are pitching little rocks, trying to hit a metal container. They are
making bets and running out into the rain to get fresh supplies of rocks. Mario
is getting a back rub from one of the Filipino electricians. Jimmy is talking about
Monte Cristo cigars. The bottom of my shelter is starting to run with mud.
FIocer. Ebert
The whole architecture of the celebrity interview has collapsed since this was written in
1970. When I began as a journalist, it was possible to win small glimpses of the real lives
of celebrity subjects; today publicists try to dictate every condition of a brief seance with
a star, which typically takes place in a neutral hotel room with the publicist hovering by
the door. The resulting bloodless interview is usually about "career choices’’and “how nice
it was to work’’with the subject’s director and costars. At the same time the most intimate
details of the subject’s life appear in the weekly tabloids. 1 wonder if the publicists real¬
ize they could serve their clients better by protecting them less. Is this, for example, a neg¬
ative portrait of Lee Marvin? 1 think not, because Marvin (1924—1987) allows himself
to be seen in completely unrehearsed human terms. (His publicist, Paul Bloch, remained
serene.) It had been arranged that 1 would spend some time with Lee Marvin in his Mal¬
ibu beach home, for a profile in Esquire, and that arrangement was not affected by the
fact that he was hung over and drinking. Of all the celebrity interviews I’ve done over the
Roger Ebert
'79
years, this is my favorite. 1 wasfree to share those hours and whatever happened during
them.
“Lee Marvin”
Who takes the Pill for us now?
Malibu, 1970
The door flew open from inside, revealing Lee Marvin in a torrid embrace, bent
over Michelle Triola, a fond hand on her rump. “Love!” he said. “It’s all love in
this house. Nothing but love. All you need is love. ...”
Michelle smiled as if to say, well. . . .
“What’s this?” Marvin cried. He snatched the Los Angeles Times from his door¬
mat and threw it at the front gate. LaBoo went careening after it, barking crazily.
“You bring that paper back here and I’ll kill you,” Marvin told LaBoo. He
snarled at LaBoo and walked down the hallway and into the living room. LaBoo
charged past him and jumped ontoachair. “LaBoo, you son ofabitch, I’mgonna
kill you,” Marvin said.
“Hello, LaBoo,” Michelle said tenderly.
LaBoo wagged his tail.
“I need a beer,” Marvin said. “Who’s gonna get me a beer? I’m gonna get me
a beer? I feel like a beer. Hell, I need a beer. Where are my glasses?” He peered
around him. “Ever read this book? I got it for Christmas or some goddamn thing.
A history of the West. Look here. All these cowboys are wearing chaps. Work¬
ingmen, see. Look here. Bronco Billy dressed up in the East’s conception of the
Western hero. See. From a dime novel. That’s how authentic a Western we
made when we made Monte Walsh. Where’s that beer? That author, he knows
what it was really like. Get me a beer.”
“Finish your coffee,” Michelle said.
“I said get me a beer. ” Marvin paged through the book of Western lore, stop¬
ping to inspect an occasional page. When he stopped, he would pause for a mo¬
ment and then whistle, moving on. Then silence. Only the pages turning. Now
and again, a whistle.
“Where’s that fucking beer, baby?” He dropped the book on the rug. “Look,
if I want to develop an image, I’ll do it my own fucking way.”
Michelle went into the kitchen to get a beer.
“Anne . . . she seemed to be a nice girl,” Marvin said. “This was when I was
in London for the Royal Command Performance of Paint Your Wagon. Nice-
8o
Movie Stars
enough girl, Anne. Lord somebody or other kept pounding me on the back. I
told him I’d already made other arrangements.” Marvin whistled. “He kept pok¬
ing me. Lord somebody or other, never did catch his name. I advised him to
fuck off.” A pause. A whistle. “If that’s swinging, I’ll bring them back to Mal¬
ibu. Maybe to commit suicide . . .”
A record, Victory at Sea, dropped on the stereo changer. “Victory at Sea, ’’Mar¬
vin said. “Well, thousands of ships went under, right? Tells you something.”
Michelle returned with a bottle of Heineken. Marvin drank from the bottle,
a long, deep drink, and then he smiled at her. “You gonna take off your clothes
and jump on him now? Or later?” He smiled again, “Michelle, she’s a good sport.”
“Lee!” Michelle said.
“Where the hell are my glasses?” Marvin said. He took another drink from
the bottle and looked on the floor around his chair.
“He took the lenses out of his glasses,” Michelle said. “Last night. He said he
didn’t want to read any more scripts.”
“Not another single goddamned script,” Marvin said.
“So he took the lenses out of his glasses.”
“I want simply to be the real Lee. The real Lee. The real Kirk Lee.”
“You left the real Lee in London.”
“Now I’m Kirk Lee. Not Lee Lee. Kirk Lee. I flew back from London with
Sir Cary. I told him, I said, Sir Cary, that’s a nice watch you have. ” Marvin pointed
his finger like a gun and made a noise that began with a whistle and ended with
a pop. “A real nice watch, Sir Cary, I said.” Whistle-pop. On the pop, his thumb
came down.
“Cary has the same watch you have,” Michelle said.
“No,” Marvin said, “he has the same watch / have. If I saw his watch in a pho¬
tograph, I could identify it anywhere. But, who gives a shit?” Whistle-pop.
“Going back to the old neighborhood. This was London. What was it? Bulgaria?
No, Belgravia. Well it was only seven-thirty in the morning. Don’t you want to
stay up and watch the junkies jet in?" Whistle. “Fuck you, pal, I’m getting some
sleep.”
A moment’s silence for symbolic sleep. Marvin closed his eyes and threw his
head back against his chair. There was a door at the other end of the living room,
opening onto a porch that overlooked the beach. Through the door you could
hear the waves hitting the beach, crush, crush, and at this moment, while Mar¬
vin pretended to sleep, the morning resolved itself as a melancholy foggy Sat¬
urday.
“Have another anchovy, sweetheart,” Marvin said, rousing himself at last. He
drained the Heineken.
“I love them,” Michelle said.
“She’s been eating nothing but anchovies for the past day and a half,” Marvin
Roger Ebert
i 8 i
said. “You know why you like anchovies so much all of a sudden? You’re knocked
up. You’re gonna have a little Lee Marvin.”
“Lee!” Michelle said. “You can’t say that.”
“Why not?”hesaid. “Putitdown: Michelle’s knocked up. If you makeitgood
enough, they’ll never print it. And if they do print it, and come around and ask
me, did you really say that?, I’ll say, sure, 1 said it. I need another beer.”
Michelle got up and went into the kitchen.
“She’s not really knocked up,” Marvin said.
He threw a leg over the arm of the chair. “I got a haircut before I went to
London,” he said. “I mean, it got a little ridiculous there after a while. I didn’t
get my hair cut for two movies, and it got a little long. I’m going back to a . . .
not a crew cut. Back to, oh, about a Presbyterian length. I’m tired of all this
horseshit about hair.”
Marvin sighed, got up, and walked out to the porch. The air was heavy with
fog.
“That goddamn buoy,” he said. Just down from his stretch of beach, a buoy
stood in the sand. “It floated in one morning and they stuck it up there. It’s on
their property. Christ, I hate the sight of it, but I can’t do anything about it. It
looks like a phallic symbol. Hell, it is a phallic symbol. You get up in the morn¬
ing and come out here and there’s that goddamn buoy staring you in the face.”
He yawned. Down on the beach, a setter ran howling at a flock of birds. There
was a chill this Saturday morning, and sounds were curiously muffled. Marvin
peered out to sea. “Is that Jennifer Jones coming in on the surf?” he said. “No?
Good.”
Michelle came up behind him with a Heineken. “Thanks, sweetheart.” He
walked back into the living room and sat down. “What was that we saw? Bob
and Carol and Bill and Ted? What a piece of shit that was. Good performances,
but what a piece of shit.”
“I loved it,” Michelle said.
“You go for all that touch-me-feel-me bullshit anyway,” Marvin said. “Esalen.
They take your money and teach you to put one hand on two nipples. Big fuck¬
ing deal, baby.”
“It’s about love, ’’Michelle said. “It’s looking at people. Look at me with love,
Lee.”
“Take off your clothes, baby.” Whistle. “Who takes the Pill for us now?” Pop!
“LaBoo, come in here, you mean black prince.” LaBoo came in from the porch
and settled down on the rug with resignation and a sigh. “And still she wants to
marry me,” Marvin said. “It used to be, we’d check into a hotel, it was Mr. Mar¬
vin and Miss Triola. So she changed her name to Marvin, to save all that em¬
barrassment. Now it’s Mr. Marvin and Miss Marvin. . . .”
He yawned and took a pull of Heineken. Michelle excused herself and wan-
Movie Stars
182
dered down the hallway. Silence. The waves. “I never did read that interview
in Playboy, ’’Marvin said. “I read excerpts. It was all a lot of shit. They sent some
guy to interview me. 1 sucked him in so bad. I even gave him the garbage-man
story. How do you feel about violence in films, he says. I’ll throw you the fuck out of
here if you ask me that again, 1 say.”
Michelle wandered back into the room. “You took some pills?” Marvin said.
“How many did you take? Should I call the doctor?”
Michelle smiled. LaBoo, on the carpet, sighed deeply.
“LaBoo,” Michelle said, “you’re supposed to standaround and pose in a movie
star’s home. That’s what a poodle is for.”
“He stands around and shits, that’s what kind of star I am,” Marvin said. “It’s
not everybody gets a Jap lighter from Hugh Hefner. Gee, thanks, Hef" Whistle.
Pop. “Well, the royal family seemed to like the movie, anyway. Lord somebody
said he liked Jean Seberg. That was something.”
“Jean has good insides.”
“What?”
“I said Jean Seberg has good insides,” Michelle said.
“Jesus Christ, I’m living with a dyke!” Marvin said. Whistle! Pop! “My ex-
wife had something about Playboy when I read it.”
“Playboy exploits women,” Michelle said. “Women’s liberation is against Play¬
boy
“Against Playboy?” Marvin said. “Whyever more?”
“It exploits women,” Michelle said. “It presents women as sex objects.”
“Why not?” Marvin said. “Take a snatch away from a broad and what’s she
got left?” Marvin spread his legs and breathed deeply. “Oh me oh my, why must I
be a sex symbol? Why won’t they let me act?”
LaBoo snorted in his sleep, waking himself. He stood up, made a circle, lay
down again and closed his eyes.
The telephone rang. LaBoo growled with his eyes closed. Michelle went to
answer it.
“Who’s calling?” Marvin said.
“Meyer Mishkin.”
“Tell him nothing for you today, Meyer, but call back tomorrow.” Marvin
finished his Heineken, turned it upside down, watched a single drop fall out.
“My agent,” he said. “He keeps wanting to know if I’ve read any more scripts.
Fuck scripts. You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get in this fuck¬
ing business, and the next forty years trying to get out. And then when you’re
making the bread, who needs it?
“Newman has it all worked out. 1 get a million. He gets a million two, but
that includes $ 200,000 expenses. So, if that’s the game ...” Marvin shrugged.
“I never talked to Newman in my life. No, I talked to him on Park Avenue once.
Roger Ebert
83
Only to give him a piece of advice. This fifteen-year-old girl wanted his auto¬
graph. He told her he didn’t give autographs, but he’d buy her a beer. Paul, I
said, she’s only fifteen. 1 don’t give a shit, he said.” Marvin whistled. “I think it
shows,” he said. “With Newman, it shows. Cut to an old broad in Miami Beach
looking at his picture in Life magazine: A Gary Cooper he ain’t.”
Marvin took another beer from Michelle. “I’m waiting for some young guy
to come along and knock me off so I can go to the old actor’s home and talk
about how great we were in nineteen-you-know. Am I waiting for him? I’d hire
guys to knock him off. Something the other day really brought it home. . . .”
He rummaged in a stack of magazines and papers next to his chair.
“I lost it.”
Michelle held up a book.
“No,” he said, “the other one. Yeah, here it is. The United States Marine Corps
in World War II. Wake Island. Let’s see.”
He produced a pair of glasses and put them on. “This cat in command. Let’s
see here . . .” He paged through the book, looking for something. “This cat—
yeah, here it is. He was defending the island. When the brass asked the defender
of the island if there was anything to be done for them, the cat wired back: Yes.
Send us more Japs.”
Marvin whistled and squinted down at the page in wonder.
“Send us more Japs. Well, Japs were the last thing we needed at the time. Cut
to John Wayne: Yes, send us more Japs! The bitch of it is, not until years later did
it come out that it’s the decoder’s job to pad messages at the beginning and the
end. So all the world was applauding this bastard’s nerve, and what the world
took as a gesture of defiant heroism was merely padding.”
Marvin got up and went into the kitchen. “Something good about Duke, I
gotta admit,” he called back over his shoulder. “When he’s on, he’s on. Send us
more Japs.”
There was a rattle of bottles from the kitchen. “You stole all the beer!
Michelle? You drank it all?”
“We’re out,” Michelle said.
“Make the call,” Marvin said, coming back into the living room.
“It’ll take them two hours to get here,” Michelle said.
“Make the call. Make the call, or I may have to switch to the big stuff.”
“I have other plans for you this afternoon.”
“No—not that!” Marvin fell back in his chair. “Anything but that!” Horrified.
“It’s such a foggy, gray old day,” Michelle said. “We ought to just sit in front
of the fire and drink Pernod. I like foggy, gray days. ...”
“Can the dog drink Pernod?” Marvin asked. “Now why the hell did I ask that?
The dog gets no Pernod in this house.” He stood up and looked through the win-
do w at the surf, his hands in his pockets. “I mean she really could have hurt her-
184 Movie Stars
self, Jennifer. Came floating in on a wave . . . What’s the number of the liquor
store, honey?”
“Oh, nine four six six something. You ought to know.”
Marvin went into the kitchen to make the call. “Yeah, hi. Listen, this is Lee
Marvin down at 2 1404.” Pause. “Heh, heh. You did, huh? Yeah, well this is me
again.” Pause. “Heh, heh. Yeah, pal, get anything cold down here. Beer. Yeah.
What? Whatdaya mean, light or dark? The green one.” He hung up.
“Didn’t you order any anchovies?” Michelle said. “It goes back to my Sicilian
grandmother.”
Another record dropped on the turntable: faint, ghostly harp music. Marvin
whirled wildly, looking up into the shadows of the far corners of the room.
“Jesus, mother,” he said, “will you please stay out of the room? 1 asked you to
come only at night.” He hit the reject button. “I studied violin when I was very
young,” he said. “You think I’m a dummy, right? I’m only in dummies. The Dirty
Dozen was a dummy money-maker, and baby, if you want a money-maker, get
a dummy.”
By now he was rummaging around in the bedroom.
“Lee,” Michelle said, “you’re not going to put it on and parade around in it
again? Are you?”
“Where is it?” Marvin said.
“I think it’s in your second drawer,” Michelle said. “His cap and gown. He
got an honorary degree.”
Marvin came out of the bedroom with a pair of binoculars. “Look what I
found,” he said. He went out on the porch and peered into the mist at a thin line
of birds floating beyond the surf. “What are they? Coots, or . . . are they ducks?”
Marvin’s son, Chris, walked into the living room. “Hi, Chris,” Marvin said.
“Are these coots, or . . . ducks?” Chris went out onto the porch and had a look
through the binoculars. “Hard to say,” Chris said. He put a leash on LaBoo and
took him down to the beach for a walk. Marvin fell back into his chair. The gray¬
ness of the day settled down again. On the stereo, Johnny Cash was singing
“Greensleeves.” The beautiful music of “Greensleeves.”
“Do you realize,” Marvin said, “that he gets three million a year for singing
that shit? I walk the line, I keep my eyes wide open all the time. I met him in Nashville.
He said, You haven't heard my other stujp No, I said, 1 haven’t. He sent us his com¬
plete twenty-seven fucking albums. Jesus, Johnny, I like your stuff, but for
Christ’s sake . . .”
Marvin got down on his knees and pulled twenty-seven Johnny Cash albums
off a shelf.
“He’s embarrassed,” Marvin said, “I’m embarrassed. We have nothing to say,
really. So he sends me all his albums. I tried to listen to all of them. It took me
two weeks.”
“How old is Cher?” Michelle said.
Roger Ebert I 8 £
“Cher?”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t know yet,” Marvin said. “These glasses are no goddamned good.
Where are my glasses?”
“He went out on the porch and stepped on his other glasses,” Michelle said.
“They didn’t break, and he said it was an act of God, telling him not to read any
more scripts. So he took the lenses and scaled them into the ocean. Now he can’t
»
see.
“Why,” Marvin said, “does it take sixty-seven percent of my income to pay
the publicist? He says I should take some broad to lunch, right? It costs me thirty-
seven dollars to get out of the joint, and then she knocks me. You know what I
asked her? I’ll bet you’ve never had an orgasm, have you, I asked her.”
“Lee, you didn’t say that? Really?”
“1 never said anything like that in my life.”
Another record dropped on the stereo. “When it comes to ‘Clair de Lune,’ ”
he said, “I have to go pass water. Tinkle, is the expression. Oh, sweetheart, do
you think this day will soon be o’er? I have a hangover. We had fun last night.
Went up to the comer, had a few drinks, told a few lies.”
He disappeared down the hallway. Chris, a good-looking kid of sixteen or
seventeen, came back with LaBoo, who was banished to the porch to dry out.
LaBoo squinted in through the window, wet and forlorn. “Poor LaBoo,” Michelle
said. “It’s the second time he’s been rejected today.”
Marvin returned. “So what have you decided on?” he asked Chris.
“I was looking at a four-door 19^6 Mercedes,” Chris said.
“Hitler’s car?” Marvin said. Whistle. Pop! “Kid, you deserve the best because
you’re the son of a star. Why don’t you get a job?”
“Chris is working at a record store,” Michelle said. “He’s working for free
right now, until the owner of the store makes enough money to pay his em¬
ployees.”
“Jesus Christ,” Marvin said.
“I was looking at a BMW,” Chris said. “It’s $2,100. New, it would be three
thousand.”
“Why not get new?” Marvin said.
“I don’t have three thousand.”
“But big daddy does.”
“Let’s order pizza,” Michelle said. She picked up the phone and ordered
three pizzas, one with anchovies.
“You’re pregnant,” Marvin said. “She’s got to be. Christopher, you’re going
to be a grandfather.”
LaBoo, who had edged into the house through a crack in the door, walked
out of the bedroom now with a pair of women’s panties in his mouth.
“Christ, LaBoo, keep those pants out of sight.” Marvin said. “Last night, she
Movie Stars
i 86
says, where’dyou get these pants? 1 dunno, I say. She says, well they’re not mine. I say,
honey, 1 sure as hell didn’t wear them home. "Marvin sighed and held his hands palms
up in resignation. “The only way to solve a situation with a girl,” he said, “is just
jump on her and things will work out.”
He took the pants from LaBoo and threw them back into the bedroom. “So
what do you think?” he asked Chris.
“The BMW has fantastic cornering, Dad,” Chris said. “It has really fantastic
quality.”
Marvin paused at the door to look out at the surf. “Don’t be deceived by qual¬
ity,” he said. “Get something you like now, and trade it in later. The car may
turn out to have such fantastic quality you’ll puke seeing it around so long.”
He sighed and sat down in his chair again.
LaBoo jumped into his lap.
“LaBoo, you mean black prince,” Marvin said, rubbing the dog’s head care¬
lessly.
Klaus Kinski
The great German director Werner Herzog told me that he was a small boy when hefirst
saw Klaus Kinski (1926—1991), striding through the courtyard of the building where he
lived. “1 knew at that moment that 1 would be a film director and that 1 would direct Kin¬
ski," he said. Years later, convincing Kinski to make Aguirre, the Wrath of God
(1972), he told the actor it was his fate’’ to make the film. It became legend that Her¬
zog at one point drew a gun on Kinski to require him to stay on the impossible location.
Kinski remembers it otherwise. This excerpt is from his memoirs, long unpublished in the
United States because of the real possibility of libel suits but finally being released this
year. When you read Kinski’s venomous attack on Herzog, it is incredible to r fleet that
he made two additionalfilms with Herzog: Nosferatu (1979) and Fitzcarraldo (1982),
the latter on South American locations similar to those described here.
Klaus Kinski
187
from Kinski Uncut
Herzog, who’s producing the film, also wrote the script—and he wants to di¬
rect it, too. I promptly ask him how much money he’s got.
When he visits me in my pad, he’s so shy that he barely has the nerve to come
in. Maybe it’s just a ploy. In any case, he lingers at the threshold for such an id¬
iotically longtime that I practically have to drag him inside. Once he’s here, he
starts explaining the movie without even being asked. I tell him that I’ve read
the script and I know the story. But he turns a deaf ear and just keeps talking
and talking and talking. I start thinking that he’ll never be able to stop talking
even if he tries. Not that he talks quickly, “like a waterfall,” as people say when
someone talks fast and furious, pouring out the words. Quite the contrary: His
speech is clumsy, with a toadlike indolence, long-winded, pedantic, choppy. The
words tumble from his mouth in sentence fragments, which he holds back as
much as possible, as if they were earning interest. It takes forever and a day for
him to push out a clump of hardened brain snot. Then he writhes in painful ec¬
stasy, as if he had sugar on his rotten teeth. A very slow blab machine. An ob¬
solete model with a nonworking switch—it can’t be turned off unless you cut
off the electric power altogether. So I’d have to smash him in the kisser. No,
I’d have to knock him unconscious. But even if he were unconscious, he’d keep
talking. Evenifhisvocalcords were sliced through, he ’ d keep talking like a ven¬
triloquist. Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech bal¬
loons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay.
I haven’t the foggiest idea what he’s talking about, except that he’s high as a
kite on himselffor no visible reason, and he’s enthralled by his own daring, which
is nothing but dilettantish innocence. When he thinks I finally see what a great
guy he is, he blurts out the bad news, explaining in a hardboiled tone about the
shitty living and working conditions that lie ahead. He sounds like a judge hand¬
ing down a well-deserved sentence. And, licking his lips as if he were talking
about some culinary delicacy, he crudely and brazenly claims that all the par¬
ticipants are delighted to endure the unimaginable stress and deprivation in
order to follow him, Herzog. Why, they would all risk their lives for him with¬
out batting an eyelash. He, in any case, will put all his eggs in one basket in order
to attain his goal, no matter what it may cost, “do or die,” as he puts it in his
foolhardy way. And he tolerantly closes his eyes to the spawn of his megaloma¬
nia, which he mistakes for genius. Granted, he sincerely confesses, he sometimes
gets dizzy thinking about his own insane ideas—by which, however, he is sim¬
ply carried away.
Then suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, he knocks me for a loop: He tries to
l 88
Movie Scars
make me believe that he’s got a sense of humor. That is, he almost uninten¬
tionally, sort of carelessly hints at it—and, half in jest, he’s embarrassed, as if
caught with his pants down.
If he initially applied some cheap tricks to get me drunk, he now throws cau¬
tion to the winds and starts lying through his teeth. He says he enjoys playing
pranks; you can go and steal horses with him, and so forth. And since he’s al¬
ready confessed all that, he doesn’t want to hide the fact that he can now laugh
his head off at his own roguishness. While it’s quite obvious that I’ve never in
my life met anybody so dull, humorless, uptight, inhibited, unscrupulous, mind¬
less, depressing, boring, and swaggering, he blithely basks in the glory of the
most pointless and most uninteresting punch lines of his braggadocio. Eventu¬
ally he kneels before himself like a worshipper in front of his idol, and he re¬
mains in that position until somebody bends down and raises him from his
humble self-worship. After dumping these tons of garbage (which stinks so hor¬
ribly that I felt like puking), he actually pretends to be a naive, innocent, almost
rustic hick—a poetic dreamer, or so he emphasizes, as if he were living in his
own little world and didn’t have the slightest notion of the brutal material side
of things. But I can very easily tell that he considers himself ever so cunning, that
he’s waiting in ambush, dogging my every step and desperately trying to read
my mind. He’s racking his brain, trying to determine how he can outfox me in
every clause of the contract. In short, he has every intention of bamboozling me.
Still and all, I agree to do the movie—but only because of Peru. I don’t even
know where it is. Somewhere in South America, between the Pacific, the desert,
and the glaciers, and in the most gigantic jungle on earth.
The script is illiterate and primitive. That’s my big chance. The jungle smol¬
ders in it like something that infects you when you see it, a virus that invades
you through your eyes and enters your bloodstream. I feel as if I knew this land
with the magical name in some other lifetime. An imprisoned beast can never
forget the reality of freedom. The caged bird cranes its neck through the bars
to peer at the clouds racing by.
I tell Herzog that Aguirre has to be crippled because his power must not be
contingent on his appearance. I’ll have a hump. My right arm will be longer than
my left, as long as an ape’s. My left arm will be shortened so that since I’m a
southpaw I have to carry my sword on the right side of my chest, and not in the
normal way, on my hip. My left leg will be longer than my right, so that I have
to drag it along. I’ll advance sideways, like a crab. I’ll have long hair—down to
my shoulders by the time we start shooting. I won’t need a phony hump, or a
costumer or a makeup man smearing me up. I will be crippled because I want to
be. I’ll get my spine used to my crippling. Just as I’m beautiful when I want to
be. Ugly. Strong. Feeble. Short or tall. Old or young. When I want to be. The
way I hold myself will lift the cartilage from my joints and use up their gelatin.
Klaus Kinski
i 89
I will be crippled—today, now, on the spot, this very instant. Henceforth every¬
thing will be geared to my condition: costumes, cuirasses, scabbards, weapons,
helmets, boots, and so on.
I determine the costume: I tear a couple of pages out of books showing Old
Master paintings. I explain the changes I want, and I fly to Madrid with Herzog
to find armor and weapons. After days of rummaging through mountains of rusty
scrap metal, I fish out a sword, a dagger, a helmet, and a cuirass, which has to
be trimmed because I’m a cripple.
Traveling all the way to the jungle is the worst kind of agony. Penned up in
old-fashioned trains, wrecks of trucks, and cagelike buses, we eat and camp out
like pigs. Sometimes in Quonset huts or other torture chambers. We can’t even
think about getting any sleep. W e can barely breathe. N o toilets, no way to wash.
Many days and nights. I stay dressed day and night; otherwise the mosquitoes
would eat me alive. I feel as if I’m standing under a nonstop jet of boiling water.
Indoors the heat is lethal. But outdoors it’s just as venomously hot. Whole
mountains of garbage, inundated by a cesspool of human piss and shit. The pop¬
ulace tosses the ripped-out eyes and innards of slaughtered animals into this
sewage from hell. Huge carrion birds the size of great Danes strut and squat on
this horror as if it were their private playground.
Wherever I go I see these disgusting Quonset huts. If only I didn’t have to
lay eyes on these half-finished cement barracks with corrugated-iron roofs.
Nothing is completed. Everything is abandoned halfway through, as if it had been
surprised by the decay. Iron window shades and fences jeer at you. Why?
Garbage heaps, sewage, eyes, innards, breeding grounds, carrion birds and—
TV antennas. Just like in New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, or Hong Kong, but
more loathsome.
The road into the wilderness is long and tortuous—but no abomination is too
unbearable to escape this hell on earth.
And as if Minhoi and I were to be rewarded for our getaway, we feel that our
hair is becoming silkier, our skin softer, like the fur of wild beasts that have been
set free; our bodies are lither and suppler, our muscles are tensing for a leap,
our senses are more alert and receptive. Minhoi has never been more beautiful
since the tiger trap in Vietnam.
Swelling up from mosquito bites without having eaten or drunk anything, we
reel toward the next leg of our journey.
A little Inca girl stands on the runway for military aircraft. She’s got a small
monkey on her arm and she wants to sell it. But the terrified monkey clings to
the girl, afraid that the buyer might take it away.
Here we clamber into ancient, battered transport planes for paratroopers,
and the propellers rage in my temples like pneumatic hammers. A pungent
stench, the odor of gasoline, hunger, thirst, headaches, and stomach cramps, and
Movie Stars
190
no toilet here either. Pent up and huddling together on the hot steel floor of the
windowless plane. Hour after hour. During the flight each passenger in turn can
spend one moment climbing from the plane’s tomblike rear into the cockpit and
peering out through a tiny window. Far below, the green ocean, thousands of
miles of jungle, with a yellow tangle of vipers winding through it—the biggest
river network in the world.
Next, single-engine amphibians that have to nose-dive to avoid missing that
slim chance when the jungle opens—and promptly closes again.
Then more trucks and bus cages. Indian canoes. And finally the rafts, on which
we stand, chained to one another, to the cargo, and to the raft, as we shoot over
raging rapids. Our fists clutching ropes, as if we were making a laughable effort
to halt runaway horses by clasping their reins even though the horses have al¬
ready plunged off a cliff. The raft is too heavily loaded; the Indians warned us.
But blowhard Herzog, arrogant and ignorant as he is, mocked their warnings
and called them ridiculous. We’re all in costume and fully equipped, because
we wanted to shoot while riding the rapids. Herzog misses out on the grandest
and most incomprehensible things because he doesn’t even notice them. I keep
yelling at the stupid cameraman through the thunder of our nose-dive, telling
him to at least roll the camera because we’re risking our lives. But all he says is
that Herzog ordered him not to press the button without his, Herzog’s, say-so.
I’m disgusted by this whole movie mob—they act as if you’re supposed to
shoot a flick in a pigpen.
My heavy leather costume, my long boots, helmet, cuirass, sword, and dag¬
ger weigh over thirty pounds. If the raft were to capsize because of Herzog’s
delusions of grandeur, I ’ d be doomed. I ’ d b e unable t o get out of m y cuirass an d
leather doublet, which are buckled in back. Besides, the rapids are cut through
with a chain of jagged reefs, and their razorlike tips lurk under the spume like
piranhas, sometimes even looming out of the lashed waters.
And so, like a fired missile, we hurtle downstream while the steep waves at¬
tack our raft like hysterical bulls and clap together way over our heads. The air
is filled with foam like white drool.
Suddenly, as if the plunging water had furiously spat us out, we glide almost
soundlessly along a calm and powerful branch of the river in the middle of the
jungle and deeper and deeper into its interior. There it lies: the wilderness. It
seizes me. Sucks me in—hot and naked like the sweaty, sticky, naked body of
a lovesick woman with all her mysteries and wonders. I gape at the jungle and
can’t stop marveling and worshipping. . . .
Animals as graceful as in fairy tales . . . Plants strangling one another in their
embraces . . . Orchids stretched on stumps of rotten trees like young girls on
the laps of dirty old men . . . Radiant metallic-blue butterflies as big as my head
. . . Pearly floods of butterflies alighting on my mouth and my hands—the pan¬
ther’s eye blending into the flowers . . . Frothy streams of flowers; green, red,
Klaus Kinski
i 9 i
and yellow clouds of birds . . . Silver suns . . . Violet fogs . . . The kissing lips
of the fish . . . The golden song of the fish . . .
We’re going to be living exclusively on rafts for the next two months. Drift¬
ing downstream toward the Amazon. Minhoi and I have a raft to ourselves. We
either float way ahead of the other rafts or lag behind as far as possible. When
night falls, we moor our raft to lianas. Then I lie awake, diving into the galax¬
ies and starry archipelagoes, which hang down so low that I can reach out and
feel them.
We have a small Indian canoe that we tie to the raft, towing it along. If I don’t
have to shoot, we sneak away in the canoe, searching for cracks in the jungle
wall. Sometimes we penetrate a tight slit that may have never existed before and
that will instantly close up again. The water inside the flooded forest is so still
that it barely seems affected by our paddles, which we dip cautiously to avoid
making any noise.
Perhaps no boat has ever glided across these waters, perhaps no man has set
foothere in millions of years. Not even a native. We wait without speaking. For
hours on end. I feel the jungle coming nearer, the animals, the plants, which
have been watching us for a long while without showing themselves. For the first
time in my life I have no past. The present is so powerful that it snuffs out all
bygones. I know that I’m free, truly free. I am the bird that has managed to break
out of its cage—that spreads its wings and soars into the sky. I take part in the
universe.
Although I constantly try to keep out of his way, Herzog sticks to me like a
shithouse fly. The mere thought of his existence here in the wilderness turns my
stomach. When I see him approaching in the distance, I yell at him to halt. I shout
that he stinks. That he disgusts me. That I don’t want to listen to his bullshit.
That I can’t stand him!
I keep hoping he’ll attack me. Then I’ll shove him into a side branch of the
river, where the still waters teem with murderous piranhas, and I’ll watch them
shred him to bits. But he doesn’t do it; he doesn’t attack me. He seems unfazed
when I treat him like a piece of shit. Besides, he’s too chicken. He attacks only
when he thinks he’ll keep the upper hand. Herzog pounces on a native, an In¬
dian who’s taken the job to keep his family from starving and puts up with any¬
thing for fear of being kicked out. Or else he assails a stupid, untalented actor
or a helpless animal. Today he ties up a llama in a canoe and sends it tearing down
the rapids—supposedly because this is required by the plot of the movie, which
he wrote himself! I find out about the llama only when it’s too late. The animal
is already drifting toward the whirlpool, and no one can save it. I spot it rear¬
ing in its mortal fear and yanking at its fetters, struggling to escape its gruesome
execution. Then it vanishes behind a bend of the river, shattering against the
jagged reefs and dying a tortuous death by drowning.
Now I hate that killer’s guts. I shriek into his face that I want to see him croak
192
Movie Stars
like the llama that he executed. He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An
anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and
paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his
brain explode! No panther claws should rip open his throat—that would be much
too good for him! No! The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gob¬
ble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yel¬
low fever! Leprosy! It’s no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths,
the more he haunts me.
We drift down the river all day long, shooting endlessly. Night falls. Never¬
theless we all gather ashore, where a night scene is to be filmed. Herzog and his
production morons haven’t even supplied illumination—no flashlight, nothing.
The night is pitch-black and we keep falling on our faces, one after another. We
tumble into swampy holes, stumble over roots and tree trunks, run into the
knives of thorny palms, get our feet caught in lianas, and almost drown. The
area is teeming with snakes, which kill at night after storing up their reserves of
poison throughout the day. We’re completely exhausted, and once again it’s
been an eternity since we ate or drank anything, including water. No one has a
clue as to what, where, and why we’re supposed to shoot in this garbage dump,
which stinks to high heaven.
Suddenly, in full armor, I plunge into a swamp hole. The harder I try to get
my body out of the mud, the deeper I sink. Finally, in a blind fury, I yell, “I’m
splitting! Even if I have to paddle all the way to the Atlantic!”
“If you split, I’ll ruin you!” says that wimp Herzog, looking scared of the
chance he’s taking.
“Ruin me how, you bigmouth?” I ask him, hoping he’ll attack me so I can kill
him in self-defense.
“I’ll shoot you,” he babbles, like a paralytic whose brain has softened. “Eight
bullets are for you, and the ninth is for me!”
Whoever heard of a pistol ora rifle with nine bullets? There’s no such thing!
Besides, he has no firearm; I know it for a fact. He’s got no rifle or pistol, not
even a machete. Not even a penknife. Not even a bottle opener. I’m the only
one with a rifle: a Winchester. I have a special permit from the Peruvian gov¬
ernment. To buy bullets I had to spend days on end running my legs off from
one police station to the next for signatures, stamps, all that shit.
“I’m waiting, you vermin,” I say, truly glad that things have reached this pass.
“I’m going back to my raft now and I’ll be waiting for you. If you come, I’ll shoot
you down.”
Then I stride back to our raft, where Minho'i has fallen asleep in her hammock.
I load my Winchester and I wait.
At around four a.m. Herzog comes paddling up to our raft and apologizes.
Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty,
Klaus Kinski
1 93
sadistic, treacherous, blackmailing, cowardly, thoroughly dishonest creep. His
so-called “talent” consists of nothing but tormenting helpless creatures and, if
necessary, torturing them to death or simply murdering them. He doesn’t care
about anyone or anything except his wretched career as a so-called filmmaker.
Driven by a pathological addiction to sensationalism, he creates the most sense¬
less difficulties and dangers, risking other people’s safety and even their lives—
just so he can eventually say that he, Herzog, has beaten seemingly unbeatable
odds. For his movies he hires retards and amateurs whom he can push around
(and allegedly hypnotize!), and he pays them starvation wages or zilch. He also
uses freaks and cripples of every conceivable size and shape, merely to look in¬
teresting. He doesn’t have the foggiest inkling of how to make movies. He
doesn’t even try to direct the actors anymore. Long ago, when I ordered him
to keep his trap shut, he gave up asking me whether I’m willing to carry out his
stupid and boring ideas.
If he wants to shoot another take because he, like most directors, is insecure,
I tell him to go fuck himself. Usually the first take is okay, and I won’t repeat
anything—certainly not on his say-so. Every scene, every angle, every shot is
determined by me, and I refuse to do anything unless I consider it right. So I can
at least partly save the movie from being wrecked by Herzog’s bungling.
After eight weeks most of the crew are still living like pigs. Penned together
on rafts like cattle going to slaughter, they eat garbage fried in lard, and, most
dangerous of all, they guzzle the river water, which can give them all kinds of
diseases, even leprosy. None of them is vaccinated against any of these deadly
scourges.
Minho'i and I cook alone on our raft. We dump soil on the wooden floor and
start a fire. If either of us dives into the river to swim or wash, the other watches
out for piranhas. Normally we have nothing to cook, and we feed on fantastic
jungle fruits, which contain enough liquid. But these heavenly fruits are hard to
get since we float downstream almost nonstop, and often there are long stretches
when we can’t go ashore to look for produce.
Eventually we start feeling our malnutrition. We grow weaker; my belly
swells up, and I’m all skin and bones. The others are even worse off.
The wilderness isn’t interested in arrogant bigmouth movie makers. It has
no pity for those who flout its laws.
At three in the morning we’re violently awakened on our rafts. We’re told
there’s no time for breakfast, even coffee. We’ll only be traveling for twenty
minutes, up to the next Indian village on the river. There we’ll get everything.
The alleged twenty minutes turn into eighteen hours. Herzog has lied to us, as
usual.
With our heads in heavy steel helmets that get so hot from the pounding sun
that they bum us, we’re exposed to the ruthless heat for days on end, without
i 9 4
Movie Stars
shelter, without the slightest shade, without food or drink. People drop like flies.
First the girls, then the men, one after another. Almost everyone’s legs are fes¬
tering from mosquito bites and distorted by swelling.
Toward evening, we finally reach an Indian village, but it’s blazing away. Her¬
zog set it on fire, and even though we’re starving and dying of thirst, reeling,
exhausted after eighteen hours of infernal heat, we have to attack the village—
just as it says in the mindless script.
We spend the night in the village, camping in the miserable barracks that
haven’t burned down. Giant rats insolently frolic about, circling closer and
closer, drawing nearer and nearer to our bodies. They probably sense how fee¬
ble we are, and they’re waiting for the right time to pounce on us. More and
more of them appear.
Someone tells Herzog that his people can’t continue if we don’t get better
food and especially water. Herzog answers that they can drink from the river.
Besides, he goes on, they ought to collapse from exhaustion and starvation: That’s
what’s called for in the script. Herzog and his head producer have their own se¬
cret cache of fresh vegetables, fruit, French camembert, olive oil, and bever-
agCS '
As we drift along, one of the Americans falls dangerously ill; he’s got yellow
fever and a high temperature, and he’s writhing on the raft. Herzog claims that
the American is malingering; he refuses to let him be brought ashore at Iquitos,
which is getting closer and closer.
When we’re near Iquitos and our rafts drift into the Amazon, we ignore Her¬
zog and carry our patient ashore, to a hospital. We take the day off in order to
buy the most necessary food, mineral water, bandages, medicines, and salves
for mosquito bites.
Ten weeks later the final scene of the movie is shot: Aguirre, the sole sur¬
vivor, his mind gone, is on his raft with several hundred monkeys, floating
downstream toward the Atlantic. Most of the monkeys on the raft jump into
the water and swim back to the jungle. A gang of trappers plans to sell them to
American laboratories for experiments. Herzog has borrowed them. When
only some hundred monkeys are left, waiting to dive into the waves and regain
their freedom, I order Herzog to film right away. I know that this opportunity
won ’ t knock twice. When the take is done, the last monkeys spring into the river
and swim toward the jungle, which receives them.
Mike FIoyko
Mike Royko and John Belushi didn’t look at all alike, but Belushi was the right choice to
play a Royko-esque character in the movies because he came from the same Chicago nei gh-
borhood, spoke the same language, and had been studying Royko since he was a child;
few actors are given such preparation. Continental Divide, directed by Michael Apted,
is a movie that’s overlooked on Belushi’sfilmography—it wasn’t one of his big hits, and
it didn’t permit the kind of over-the-top performance that made him famous—but it has
a lot of heart to it. One might have wished for a story set entirely in the newspaper world
of Chicago, where Royko is a modern reincarnation of the Front Page era, instead of all
the silliness about the love affair with the bird-watcher, but in its own way the movie is
charming. Like Royko, 1 knew Belushi; I remember late nights in the speakeasy he and
Dan Aykroyd opened behind the Earl of Old Town, across the street from Second City.
Like Royko, 1 miss him. There wasn’t a mean bone in his body.
John Belushi
Belushi’s OK, But . .
September 27, 1981
At least a hundred people have asked me for my reaction to the movie Conti¬
nental Divide, which recently opened.
Even radio and TV stations want to interview me on the subject.
It isn’t that I’m a movie expert, because I’m not. I just like to look at them,
especially ones with Bo Derek.
But the male star of Continental Divide plays a chain-smoking newspaper
columnist who regularly appears on page two of the Chicago Sun-Times. And the
movie’s publicists have said that he is supposed to be a “Royko-like” character.
96
Movie Stars
So, obviously, part of my reaction is that I feel flattered.
Of course, I’m not the first newspaperman to be portrayed in a movie.
In All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward was played by Robert Redford,
whom many women consider to be the world’s handsomest man.
In the same movie, Carl Bernstein was played by Dustin Hoffman, who many
women say has an intense, electric sexuality about him.
And in that same movie, editor Ben Bradlee was played by Jason Robards,
who many women say has a craggy-faced, tough, worldly, mature sex appeal.
But me? My character was played by pudgy John Belushi, who became fa¬
mous as Bluto, the gluttonous, disgusting fraternity slob in the movie Animal
House. Many women say that he makes them want to throw up and dial 911.
So as much as I like Belushi personally, I think the producers might have made
a mistake in casting my part.
I think Paul Newman would have been a better choice, although he’s older
than I am. And in appearance we’re different because he has blue eyes and mine
are brownish-green.
And I would have been satisfied with Clint Eastwood, although he’s taller than
I am. Or even Burt Reynolds or Alan Alda.
Some of my friends have said John Travolta would have been the perfect
choice to play me. He’s probably too young, but I suppose if they touched his
sideburns with a bit of gray, he would have been believable in the part.
As to the plot of the movie itself, I had mixed reactions. Some of it was re¬
alistic, and some of it was ridiculous.
Some examples:
The movie began with the columnist picking on a dishonest Chicago aider-
man. That’s realistic. I can no more ignore a Chicago alderman than a dog can
ignore a fireplug.
However, the alderman soon has the columnist beaten to a pulp by two
Chicago cops. That’s unrealistic. Chicago cops haven’t beaten up a newsman
since the 1968 Democratic convention, and most of those newsmen were from
New York and Washington, so they had it coming.
After the columnist is hospitalized by the beating, his editor is so concerned
for his safety that he gets him out of town, sending him into a remote mountain
wilderness to try to interview a female, hermit-like bird-expert who lives in the
mountains and studies eagles.
That’s unrealistic. For one thing, I’m afraid of heights. And I’d never climb
a mountain to interview a bird-watcher. I’d ask her to come down the moun¬
tain for dinner so we could study such birds as coq au vin, or rock comish hen
and wild rice.
On the way up the mountain, the columnist loses his supply of liquor and cig¬
arettes and is heartbroken. That’s stunningly realistic. In fact, I wept during that
part of the film.
Mike Royko
>97
But he goes on without them. That’s unrealistic. I would have immediately
gone back down the mountain to the nearest bar to get new supplies. Then I
would have grabbed the next train back to Chicago.
When he finally finds the female bird-watcher, she turns out to be beautiful,
self -reliant and brilliant, and she thinks the columnist is a jerk. That is so grimly
realistic that I almost left the theater.
But later, she becomes fond of him, and they ended up more or less sharing
the same sleeping bag, which wasn’t very realistic, since a bird-watcher’s vision
couldn’t be that bad.
Then he leaves her in the mountains and comes back to Chicago, where he
just mopes around feeling miserable, low, blue, and filled with self-pity. That’s
realistic because I feel that way when things are going good.
But soon he pulls himself out of the dumps by chasing the crooked alderman
again, and that’s realistic. There’s nothing like good, clean sport to make a per¬
son feel better.
Then the beautiful bird-watcher turns up in Chicago and they resume their
romance, and he takes her to eat in the restaurant on the ninety-fifth floor of
the John Hancock. That’s unrealistic. At that joint’s prices, she’d have to eat
cheeseburgers in Billy Goat’s.
I won’t describe the finish of the movie, although it has a happy ending. And
that’s unrealistic, especially considering that once he got back from the moun¬
tain he had a chance to replenish his liquor supply, and when she came to
Chicago, she had a chance to meet lean young men who wear gold chains and
Gucci shoes.
There was one other thing that bothered me (and made my friends hoot and
jeer and snicker at me): the sex scene, which wasn’t at all explicit, except that
the columnist didn’t have any clothes on from the waist up.
As I bluntly told Belushi when he asked me about that scene: “John, I didn’t
like it because I don’t have a hairy back.”
And he answered: “Yeah? And you don’t have a hairy head, either.”
See? They should have cast Yul Brynner in my part.
My Belushi Pals
March 7, 1982
Like so many Chicagoans, last Thursday night I was watching a rerun of the orig¬
inal “Saturday Night Live” show.
I was rewarded when John Belushi came on to do one of his outrageous skits.
As happened whenever I saw John perform, I felt a mix of emotions.
Amusement, of course. All he had to do was lift a brow and curl his lip and
he could make me laugh.
i 9 8
Movie Scars
But I also felt pride. As I wrote here once before, I go back a long way with
the Belushi family. John’s late Uncle Pete was one of my closest friends and was
godfather to my first child. John’s father and I were also friends. I first set eyes
on John when he was about five years old, running around his uncle’s back yard
while I devoured his Aunt Marion’s wonderful Greek cooking. I don’t remem¬
ber that he was very funny then. But he and the other Belushi kids were sure
noisy.
So when John became successful, I suppose I felt something like a distant uncle
and was proud for him.
But, as I watched him on my TV or in a movie theater, I always felt puzzled.
Where had this incredible comic instinct come from? His parents were good peo¬
ple, but not visibly humorous. Yet they produced two sons, John and Jim, who
have the rare gift of being able to make strangers laugh.
I remember when I first learned that John had become an entertainer. It had
to be, oh, a dozen years ago and I was at an independent political rally at a big
restaurant on the South Side. A young man came up to me and, in a shy way,
said: “Uncle Mike?”
I guess I blinked for a moment because he said: “You don’t remember me?”
I said: “I know you’re one of the Belushi kids by your goofy face, but I’m not
sure which one.”
He laughed. “I’m John. Adam’s son.”
I asked him if he was there because he was interested in politics.
“I just joined Second City. We’re going to be doing a few skits here tonight.”
I was impressed. Second City was already a nationally known improvisational
theater group. I wish I could say that after I saw him perform, I knew he would
one day be a big star. But I didn’t. I could see he had a flair, but I wouldn’t have
bet you money that by the time he was thirty, he’d have one of the most famil¬
iar faces in America. A lot of people are funny, but very few have a talent that
might be called genius.
As I said, I always had a mix of feelings when I watched John. And last Thurs¬
day night, I also felt a twinge of sad nostalgia.
That’s because he was playing Pete the Greek, the owner of the short-order
diner. You know the one: “Chizbooga, chizbooga, cheeps, cheeps, cheeps.”
Whenever I watched him do that character, it was like flipping back in time
almost thirty years.
I’d be sitting in a short-order diner in Logan Square, waiting for my wife to
finish work upstairs in a doctor’s office. The diner was where Eddie’s Barbeque
now stands, just across the side street from where the old “L” terminal used
to be.
John’s Uncle Pete would be at the grill, slapping cheeseburgers on the grill,
jiggling the fries. Marion would be serving the food and coffee and handling the
cash register.
Mike Royko
199
I don’t remember if Pete said “chizbooga” and “cheeps” exactly the way John
later did. His thick accent was Albanian, not Greek. But it was close.
And somewhere in another neighborhood, in another short-order joint,
Adam Belushi was slapping cheeseburgers on another grill. Everybody inthe fam¬
ily was chasing the American dream. And they were doing it the way immigrants
have always done it. Whatever works—and never mind how many grease burns
you get on your arms.
If it was a Friday, we’d probably wind up in Peter’s third-floor flat or my
attic flat, drinking Metaxa and talking about the things we might do some day.
If I ever got off that weekly neighborhood newspaper and he and Adam could
pyramid those short-order grills into the restaurant of his dreams.
We were all together the night a few years later that the dream restaurant
opened. Adam, Pete, and me and our wives. The place had thick carpets and
cloth wallpaper, oil paintings, a piano player in the bar and the best prime rib
I’ve ever had. Maybe you remember it—Fair Oaks, on Dempster, in Morton
Grove. It’s now a big Mexican restaurant.
We toasted their success. It was a long way from tending sheep in Albania,
and they had earned it. It didn’t stop there, either. Before long there were other
businesses. Peter figured he might as well go on and become an American ty¬
coon.
But life has a way of giving you the gladhand. Then slamming you with a fist.
A few years ago, Pete, still in his forties, died. At the funeral, we talked about
John and how he had gone to New York and was starting to make a name, and
how proud everybody was.
And the last time I saw John, we talked about those times and my friend Pete.
It might surprise those who saw him only on the TV or in movies, but he was
still shy and often quiet. And he had not let his success and wealth turn him into
a jerk. He was still a genuinely nice kid.
That was the night his movie Continental Divide opened in Chicago and there
was a party after the show. A reporter for Rolling Stone, who covered the evening,
later wrote that as the evening ended, John and I were hugging.
I guess we were. When you feel like a proud uncle, and see the kid up there
on a movie screen, you ought to give him a hug.
This column seems to have rambled. I’m sorry, but I just heard about John
a few hours ago, and I have difficulty writing when I feel the way I do right now.
He was only thirty-three. I learned a long time ago that life isn’t always fair.
But it shouldn’t cheat that much.
Tne Business
Alva Johnston
Philip French’s biography of Darryl F. Zanuck was titled Don’t Say Yes until I’ve Fin¬
ished Talking, and the title captured one side of Zanuck, but there were others. Of the
Golden Age moguls, he was one oj the smartest, and if Orson Welles became a Boy Won¬
der by directing Citizen Kane at twenty five, r fleet that Zanuck was studio manager at
Warner’s at twenty-six and had by then already spent eight years in the film industry.
This New Yorker profile was published in 1934, when Zanuck was engineering the hard-
boiled black-and-white social melodramas that became the Warner trademark; his entire
career at 20th Century-Fox, where he did his most important work, was still ahead. One
usually thinks of him in late middle age, graying, a big cigar in his hand. In 1934 he
was a kid, like the young Spielberg or Katzenberg, and had only just started to not fin¬
ish talking.
“The Wahoo Boy”
College men have not covered themselves with glory in Hollywood. Some have
been brilliant successes as directors and writers, but few are in places of power.
Generally speaking, the university alumni are working for the high-school alumni
and the high-school alumni are working for the grammar-school alumni. You
can roughly measure the importance of a man in the movie industry by the num¬
ber of stories told about his ignorance.
A complete survey of Hollywood might explain what is wrong with Ameri¬
can universities and why a lower education is better than a higher education in
the picture business. University training is an essential in the old, standard pro¬
fessions, but is apparently a handicap in a new, changing, experimental calling
in which imagination and judgment are more important than specialized knowl¬
edge. The semi-literates often seem to have a vehemence, decisiveness, and
single-mindedness which are commonly educated out of college men.
203
204 The Business
It is sometimes said that Hollywood does not appreciate educated men, which
is like saying that the Olympic Games do not appreciate inferior athletes. Uni¬
versity men go to Hollywood in droves and carry off many second and third
prizes, but the first prizes go to men of no Latin, no Greek, and not much Eng¬
lish. The advantage possessed by the uneducated man or half-educated man
seems to be that he is forced at an early age to face his own problems, to accept
responsibilities, to make decisions. Not every illiterate has the natural ability to
use his advantages. Start a hundred Masters of Arts and a hundred non-academic
men in a race in any pioneer field; the odds seem to be that most of the leaders
and most of the tail-enders will be uneducated men, and that the fair-to-middling
honors will be carried off by collegians.
Darryl Francis Zanuck has had a dazzling career in Hollywood. From the
greatness of his achievements it would be inferred that he had stopped school in
the sixth grade. He was a clever writer of scenarios at eighteen; at twenty-two,
he had such prestige that he was trusted to create roles for Rin-Tin-Tin; at
twenty-four, he was an acknowledged master of the horselaugh, his masterpiece
of low and broad comedy being “The Better ’Ole,” based on Baimsfather’s car¬
toons; at twenty-six, he became the studio manager of Warner Brothers and was
a leader in the transition of the film industry from the silent to the talking pic¬
tures; he put a new boldness and realism in the films in his Gangster Cycle, and
was rewarded with great box-office successes. At thirty, when he was one of
the biggest figures in Hollywood, Zanuck tore up his five-thousand-dollar-a-
week contract with Warner Brothers. He did this because the Warners insisted
on extending last year’s fifty-per-cent pay cut for two weeks after the date on
which Zanuck had promised Warner employees that the old salaries would be
restored. He immediately formed Twentieth Century Pictures, Inc., in cooper¬
ation with Joseph Schenck, and claims to have broken all records in the last year
with his high percentage of hits. These include “The House of Rothschild,” “The
Affairs of Cellini,” “Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back,” and “The Gallant Lady.”
From Zanuck’s record, anyone would naturally guess thathe must have stopped
school in the sixth grade. The fact is, however, that he went on and on and
reached the eighth grade before he quit the academic halls of Wahoo, Nebraska.
His present job is no sinecure. In addition to bossing his company’s pictures,
he undergoes a terrific reading grind in search of new material .Ten professional
digesters digest every new Broadway drama and nearly every new novel in the
English language for him. Thousands of works go through this mill for Zanuck’s
benefit. Short, medium, and long digests are made of each play or drama. The
short digest is one paragraph. Ordinarily that is all that Zanuck reads. If, how¬
ever, there is anything in the first digest which catches his attention, he reads
the second digest, which is three paragraphs long. If he is still interested, he calls
for the third digest, which consists of twenty paragraphs. If he thinks he has an
Alva Johnston
2 o S
idea for a picture, he calls for the book or the play. If it is historical or bio¬
graphical, he may send for all the available literature on the subject. When he
boarded the train last May on his way to Africa for a hunting trip, he took with
him a five foot shelf of books on Cardinal Richelieu because he planned to cast
Arliss as the deft and domineering old prelate.
When he stopped a few days in New York on this trip, Zanuck was described
by one interviewer as a Napoleon in a vermilion bathrobe with polo ponies
painted on it. A bitter jest. Napoleons are an inferior caste in Hollywood. The
place is so overrun with Little Corporals that no one pays any attention to them.
Zanuck has accomplished too much to be dismissed with such a sneer. He is no
cheap Corsican, but it might be fair to describe him as a bantamweight, dandi¬
fied Theodore Roosevelt. He has an odd resemblance to T.R. His teeth stick
out. The lower part of his face is compressed by the weight of a massive fore¬
head. He has something of the Colonel’s swagger, dash, and obstacle-smashing
explosiveness.
Zanuck is primarily a great journalist using the screen instead of the printing
press. His news instinct was manifested in the first story he wrote for the movies.
State troopers were just beginning to be a factor in national life, and Zanuck’s
first tale was based on their pursuit of automobile thieves. The great journalist
is not the man who tries to anticipate the whims of millions; he is the man who
says, “This excites me, and I’ll make it excite them.” Zanuck has this power of
getting excited and selling his excitement to the public. The Gangster Cycle did
not enter its major phase until Zanuck read one day in the Reader’s Digest that
four hundred and eighty-six gangsters had been killed in Chicago in a year. “It’s
war!” exclaimed Zanuck. He went about the Warner Brothers studio exclaim¬
ing, “It’s war! It’s war!” He began devouring contemporary Chicago literature
and sending for contemporary Chicago historians. He acquired a taste for undi¬
luted horror; then, with his own journalistic ability to force his own tastes on
the public, he made undiluted horror a national dish.
Zanuck became the chief interpreter of the Hardboiled Era. He backed his
own newly acquired hardboiled mood against all the canons of the American
screen by producing “Doorway to Hell” a cold and gory picture, which had an
unhappy ending, no hero, no major character that inspired sympathy. The Warn¬
ers regarded it as a reckless experiment and allowed Zanuck to spend only a small
sum in making it, but it was a box-office hit. Zanuck’s masterpiece of movie jour¬
nalism was “The Public Enemy,” in which the star roughly handled his mother,
hit one girl in the face with a grapefruit, punched another in the jaw, shot a horse
for kicking and killing a man, slaughtered competing gangsters on a large scale,
and wound up by being taken for a ride and delivered as a corpse at his mother’s
door. The picture was almost straight news-reporting, the horse-shooting inci¬
dent and nearly every other bit of action being based on real events which had
2o6
The Business
appeared in the press. Zanuck’s greatest pioneering feat was probably the lady-
socking. Previously it had been allowable in the films to shoot a woman, to poi¬
son her, to rob her, to wrong her in almost every conceivable manner, but not
to sock her. Zanuck had turned hardboiled enough to appreciate a hussy-slugging
scene; so had the public. This novel touch was greeted with universal cheers,
and wallops on the chins of America’s sweethearts grossed millions for Holly¬
wood before they became so monotonous that the fans became bored.
“The Public Enemy” was one of the greatest pieces of journalism of the
decade. It was the kind of work that Joseph Pulitzer would have done, had he
been bom half a century later and been a movie magnate instead of a newspa¬
per publisher. Earlier gangster pictures had portrayed the gangster as a demidevil
or goblin damned, a supernatural being having no legitimate connection with
the human race. Zanuck’s Public Enemy, magnificently played by James Cagney,
was a boy of decent family, a boy who had been overwhelmingly tempted by
the enormous rewards of the nineteen-twenties, the decade when crime paid.
Zanuck’s gangster was a human being in a human environment, a victim of a
corrupt time. It would be difficult to name one other thing that applied the lash
to the public conscience as “The Public Enemy” did. The Gangster Cycle is prob¬
ably the best social service performed by any agency in America in the last ten
years. Showers of gangster books and daily sensations in the newspapers failed
to rouse an apathetic public and government, but the gangster pictures stirred
the public and even disturbed the fat slumbers of municipal and federal officials.
One of President Hoover’s few accomplishments, the flank attack on hoodlums
through the income-tax gatherers, followed close upon Zanuck’s cinematic-
journalistic blast against the national disgrace. It is difficult to distribute the credit
for repeal. The gold medal should undoubtedly be awarded to the idle dream
of reduced income taxes; one of the various silver medals ought to be pinned
on the chest of Zanuck. According to the custom of Hollywood, the motion-
picture industry, instead of claiming credit for the Gangster Cycle, began to
cringe and apologize and do public penance. Instead of being acclaimed for ex¬
posing and helping to end the gangster evil, the movies were roundly abused as
the cause of the gangster evil. Public officials loathed the gangster pictures
because they mirrored the incompetence and corruption of public officials.
Politicians hated them because they indicated the harmony of politics and crime.
Idealistic world-improvers and commercialized reformers hated them because
they pictured, ten times more vividly than the printed word, the results of pro¬
hibition. Zanuck may suffer to some extent for his services to the nation. The
reform hosts, shattered by repeal, are reorganizing and seeking something new
to crusade about. They have made a determined effort to steal the crusade
against Hollywood away from the Catholics.
This will probably not harm Zanuck greatly because he possesses the sover-
Alva Johnston
207
eign journalistic gift of getting bored in time and dropping a theme bef ore it be¬
comes a public nuisance. Long before the friars, parsons, and rabbis had begun
to protest, Zanuck had announced that the hardboiled era was over. The great
journalists are not men who worry about the public, but men who are fanati¬
cally interested in themselves. When Zanuck announced that the people were
bored with lust and massacre in the films, it meant that he personally was bored
with them. He asserts that the people want biographical films, which means that
he is taking an interest in the lives of the great. Audiences desire romance, ac¬
cording to Zanuck, which means that he has turned soft and sentimental. He
prophesies a trend toward Westerns, which means that he would like to see Bill
Hart and Tom Mix cope once more with the caitiffs of the cow country. He adds
that America is surfeited with comic-opera and musical films; that is, Zanuck is
glutted with them.
Zanuck has another attribute of greatness, a turn for establishing his personal
peculiarities as laws of nature. It takes a person of vast assurance and influence
to raise his whims and weaknesses to the dignity of customs. Four-o’clock tea
became a world-wide institution because a pace-setting British matron found that
it agreed with her digestion to have a small meal between lunch and dinner.
America was largely relieved of eyestrain because Adolph S. Ochs of the New
York Times relieved himself of eyestrain. When the publisher’s eyes were good
enough to read fine print, he published his paper in fine print, paying no atten¬
tion to the indignation of readers. When Ochs approached sixty, he began to
have difficulty in deciphering his own microscopic characters, so he introduced
larger type. A few years later his eyes began to bother him, and he enlarged the
type again. This was a national blessing, because hundreds of publishers who took
Ochs as a model began to print their newspapers in readable characters. Like
Ochs and the British matron, Zanuck is trying to make the world adopt one of
his peculiarities. He likes to take a vacation of six or eight weeks to hunt bear,
moose, or lion. He started his propaganda for long vacations when he was with
Warner Brothers. Through economic necessity, the Warners had to shut down
for long periods, automatically treating Zanuck to hunting trips. Zanuck suc¬
ceeded in convincing the Warners that pictures made immediately after a shut
down were vastly superior to those made at other periods of the year. Others
accepted Zanuck’s logic. He has sold the long bear-hunting and lion-hunting fur¬
loughs widely in Hollywood. Thousands of others may, because of Zanuck’s ex¬
ample, soon be chasing giraffes and okapis.
Zanuck was born at Wahoo, Nebraska, thirty-two years ago with the two
qualities which earmarked him for greatness in Hollywood—an extraordinary
inventiveness, and a hatred of school. His inventiveness first took the form of
writing home letters full of lies about his hunting trips; his grandfather owned
several large ranches, which were hunting grounds for the boy as soon as he was
2o8
The Business
able to hold up a rifle. At eight, he went to Los Angeles with his mother, who
had been sent there for her health. The boy was placed in the Page Military Acad¬
emy. He began to play hooky as soon as he discovered that a dollar a day could
be earned by acting as an extra at the old Essanay lot in Glendale. One day, when
he was a little Indian girl supporting Bessie Barriscale, who was a big Indian girl,
Bessie complained that her wig did not fit. Zanuck’s wig was snatched from his
head and placed on Bessie’s. He was sent by streetcar to a costuming house to
get a new wig. His mother happened to be on the streetcar, and that ended the
first phase of his movie career. At eight, he had made his movie debut. At nine,
he made his literary debut, a Zanuck letter of three columns appearing in the
Norfolk, Nebraska, Sentinel. It was the story of his train trip from Los Angeles
to Omaha, a travelogue about Indians, greasers, cowboys, wild animals, and fell
deeds, as seen through a car window. The things that he saw, experienced, heard,
read, or made up during his boyhood became raw materials for letters, of which
he wrote enormous quantities. Relatives and friends of young Zanuck were fur¬
nished with voluminous minutes of all that passed in his mind. His favorite au¬
thors were Mark Twain and O. Henry. O. Henry is Zanuck’s god. For mental
nourishment, he reads an O. Henry story every night. Zanuck still has a passion
for writing and regards himself primarily as a writer. He considers the writing
corps in Hollywood more important than the actors or directors.
Zanuck’s grandfather and the United States Army were about equally re¬
sponsible for discovering him. In 1917 and 1918, the grandfather used to have
Zanuck’s letters from the Mexican border, and later from France, published in
a Nebraska weekly. They were republished in Omaha and elsewhere. The let¬
ters in the Omaha papers attracted official attention, and Zanuck was appointed
Thirty-seventh Division correspondent to the A. E. F. newspaper, Stars and Stripes.
He had lied four years onto his age and joined the army when he was fourteen
years old—one day before his fifteenth birthday.
It was on the advice of a major, an admirer of Zanuck’s correspondence in
the Stars and Stripes, that the boy decided to become an author. He was seven¬
teen years old when he returned from France. He wrote short stories and seri¬
als for several months without getting much encouragement from publishers.
Shortly after his eighteenth birthday, he received his first check—from Argosy.
A little later, he landed “Mad Desire” in Physical Culture. Several others of his
stories were accepted, and he was settling down to a literary career when he
learned that the Fox Film Company had considered one of his stories as a vehi¬
cle for William Russell. Fox finally vetoed the story, but the fact that the com¬
pany had shown an interest was enough for the young writer, and he went to
Hollywood. The process of crashing the movies was simple in Zanuck’s case.
He sent in a card to William Russell, outlined an original story, qnd sold it for
five hundred and twenty-five dollars. He later learned that the man who adapted
Alva Johnston
209
his story for the screen got fourteen hundred dollars for the adaptation. The boy
from Wahoo then and there became an adapter. He filled his next story with
technical language such as “closeup,” “medium shot,” and “fade in” without
knowing what they meant, and he collected an adapter’s pay for his work. For
the next three years he did a brisk business both in originals and adaptations.
II
Darryl Zanuck was a big man in Hollywood at the age of twenty. At twenty-
one, he became a nonentity. The studios had been buying his stories in 19 2 2. A
year later they lost all interest in him.
Zanuck was a victim of the Big Name Corner of 1923. The Famous Players-
Lasky Company had set out to gain a monopoly of the world’s supply of Names.
In self-defence the other companies began recruiting their own garrisons of
celebrities. There was furious bidding for Sir Gilbert Parker, Harold Bell Wright,
Mme. Glyn, Rex Beach, Rupert Hughes, Gouvemeur Morris, and scores of oth¬
ers. Movie magnates were ready to cross the Mojave Desert on their hands and
knees in order to be insulted by a Big Name.
Rupert Hughes and a few others made good, but the experiment on the
whole was a failure. The scramble for Names had been too sudden and fierce
for much discrimination. Fabulous sums were paid for literary reputations whose
possessors had long outlived their productive capacity. It took Hollywood two
years to discover that it had been importing large quantities of condescending
arteriosclerosis. The experience was costly but valuable. It taught the movie in¬
dustry that famous old gentlemen of letters seldom write satisfactory originals
for the films and that the movie audiences care little for names of writers, with
the exception of Zane Grey and a couple of others who belong to the ages.
In the meantime the everyday screenwriters who had no novels to their credit
were starving. Poor Zanuck, who had not even written a book on Russia, was
reduced to catching white-hot rivets in an iron bucket in a shipyard near Los An¬
geles. After months as a riveter’s helper, he established the Darryl Poster & Win¬
dow Display Service, which failed because he knew nothing about drawing
posters or dressing windows. He became publicity man for a laundry and press-
agent for a hair tonic. Now and then a magnificent cinematic idea would strike
him, and he would rush to the studios with it, but would be received with sneers.
He was an untouchable, a worm, one who had not written a book. “What shall
I do?” Zanuck asked Raymond Griffith, the silk-hat comedian. Griffith, who was
shaving at the time, stopped long enough to say, “Do a book.”
Zanuck took the advice. “Habit,” by Darryl F. Zanuck, issued from the press
of a local job-printing house. Zanuck sent out engraved cards to all the studios
2 I o
The Business
announcing the book as a novel. The Los Angeles newspaper advertisements
called it a novel. But it was not a novel. The frontispiece describes “Habit” as a
collection of short stories, which is equally misleading. The book is what the
honest publishers of the eighteenth century would call a “miscellany.” It con¬
tained one short story, two rejected scenarios, and one hundred-page hair-tonic
testimonial.
Zanuck had disguised the two scenarios as storiettes and given a veneer of
fiction to the hundred-page hair-tonic ad. His literary mare’s nest was described
as a novel because there was a great demand for novelists, a small demand for
short-story writers, and no demand for hair-tonic-testimonial writers. The hair-
tonic ad was, nevertheless, the cornerstone of the book. Zanuck could not pay
the printer’s bill, and he had made an arrangement with A. F. Foster, the man¬
ufacturer of Yuccatone Hair Restorer, to defray the expense of publication in
return for a hundred-page blurb for Yuccatone. Foster got his money’s worth.
The plot of Zanuck’s hair-tonic testimonial started with a murder in a New York
night club, moved on to the effort of a broken-hearted Wall Street broker to
reform his gilded wastrel of a son, vaulted from there to a forgotten city of the
Southwestern desert, worried its way through murders, kidnappings, confla¬
grations, bad men, greasers, and half-castes, and wound up with the arrival of
the U.S. Cavalry and the discovery of Yuccatone.
It was a stroke of true Hollywood genius on Zanuck’s part to send out en¬
graved announcements of his “novel.” That was pioneering in 1923; today it
would be a routine Hollywood flourish. They open fish stores out there now
with the splendor of an Elsa Maxwell party. Art Lasky, the heavyweight prize¬
fighter, sent out engraved invitations to the opening of his filling station in Hol¬
lywood last April, and concluded the invitation with “R.S.V.P.” Zanuck is en¬
titled to a share of the glory of putting Hollywood so far ahead in etiquette that
the Old World will have to limp after it for decades.
Having a book to his credit, Zanuck now revisited the studios. “Habit”
weighed as much as Sir Gilbert Parker’s “The Right of Way,” and was as bulky
as Glyn’s “Three Weeks.” It could be tossed from hand to hand as nonchalantly
as Zane Grey’s “Riders of the Purple Sage” and brandished as impressively as
Gertrude Atherton’s “The Conqueror.” Zanuck was undeniably an author. On
his new round of the studios, he was welcomed. He sold the movie rights to the
two warmed-over scenarios. He sold the movie rights to the short story. He sold
the movie rights to the hair-tonic ad. Motion pictures were made of all four.
Zanuck got eleven thousand dollars from the movies for his Yuccatone ad and
the three other trifles. The book was not a literary sensation, but it had a fair
reception from critics. A reviewer in the New York Times said that “Habit” was
“marked by ingenuity of plot and great variety of invention.” It was also marked
by the cloth-of-gold style and the unbending grand manner of a half-educated
Alva Johnston
2 11
adolescent. Zanuck’s characters never looked at things when they might as well
rivet jet orbs on them. They never walked through doors when they might
as well stride through portals. “Illuminating realization untangles the mass of
conflicting thoughts that besieges the mind” of the hero. The hero tells his girl
friend that he cannot fail with such a goal as her love for his pinnacle. He was a
sensitive chap, and “thoughts of the man he had accidentally killed crept in like
a chafing burr and ruffled his mind unpleasantly.” His brow “corrugated in med¬
itation,” his “thoughts and emotions fumbled riotously and arrived at no defi¬
nite decisions.” In “Habit,” Zanuck displayed his contempt for such pedantries
as the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs; his hero “functions”
his mind; a sinister development “soars” his fears to a great height; slumber
“ceases” his mental activity. He speaks of “ajar doors” and of “wayward strays
from the beaten path.” He describes the Chinatown of San Francisco as being
“crowded to the lily-potted portals with throngs of heterogeneous denizens.”
By quitting school in the eighth grade, Zanuck had escaped with his genius
unscathed. He had saved his intellect from the confusion and bafflement of
higher education. But he had to pay a price for his early advantages; he had to
invent his education as he went along. He manufactures more verbal novelties
in a year than Lewis Carroll, Mrs. Malaprop, and Shakespeare did in their life¬
times. Probably no man living gets more words recorded than Zanuck does. He
has dictaphones all over his studio and home, and dictates nearly everything he
thinks of. He has a dictaphone in a projection-room, where he sees the studio
“rushes” of new photoplays; as the unedited film is run off, he dictates at high
speed, ordering cuts, making criticisms, and finishing his work the minute the
screening is over. He runs to a dictaphone on any pretext. Gene Fowler, who
was writing the script for “The Great Bamum,” had a two-hour conversation on
Bamum with Zanuck. “I can’t remember a word of this,” complained Fowler.
Zanuck went to the nearest dictaphone, dictated a thirty-thousand-word ver¬
sion of the conversation, and had it on Fowler’s desk in typewritten form next
morning. Zanuck has so much to utter in the course of a day that he has no time
to pause and grope for expressions. If a standard English word fails to enter his
mind, he invents an intelligible substitute. The substitute may be composed of
the best parts of two or three other words, or it may be a wholly new creation;
in any case, its meaning is always clear. As a rule, the new word fits smoothly
into the stream of Zanuck’s eloquence, and the listener does not suspect that it
was coined on the spur of the moment. “It gives me more time for betterment
and correctment,” he said, for example, in speaking of his position with the newly
organized Twentieth Century company.
Zanuck is at his greatest in motion-picture story conferences when his imag¬
ination runs away with his vocabulary. Things may triffle and blore and ruggle,
but everybody knows exactly what Zanuck is saying. Sam Goldwyn is the world-
2 I 2
The Business
renowned maestro of word-coinage. After conferring with Zanuck, Eddie Can¬
tor said, “Zanuck is Goldwyn without the accent.” Zanuck is never embarrassed
by his own improvements on the English language. He is never rendered self-
conscious by anything. It is not that he is nonchalant, but that his mental resources
are focused on achievement. His brain is of the primary type, which is concerned
with main issues only. He has no time or energy to squander on being self-
conscious. A writer was once fired for laughing too much when Zanuck said “a
milestone around the neck.” Zanuck’s feelings were not wounded; he simply
did not want an employee who dissipated his talents on the distinction between
“milestone” and “millstone.” Zanuck’s pronunciation is sometimes startling to
Easterners, but he merely follows the Southern California trend, which is to dis¬
regard dictionaries and pronounce all words in a straightforward, reasonable
way. When, for example, Zanuck desires to use the word “admirable,” he says
“admire” and tacks “able” onto it. One of the great institutions of Southern Cal¬
ifornia is the “premiere,” but neither Zanuck nor any other loyal Southern Cal¬
ifornian gives it the affected, Frenchified pronunciation; he calls it“preemeer.”
Hollywood, the world capital, will probably in time impose its idiom on all the
English-speaking provinces. The Hollywood dialect and the Hollywood angle
of approach were summed up in a tribute which Zanuck paid to “Les Mis-
erables,” which he was planning to turn into a picture. He called it “Lee’s Mis-
erables,” and added, “It’s an ‘I’m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang’ in costume.”
After the publication of “Habit” in 1923, Zanuck became thoroughly estab¬
lished in Hollywood. He has risen steadily ever since. He served for a while as
scenario editor to Mack Sennett, but quit because that work bored him. He then
had the good luck to become associated with the late H. C. Witwer, whose
Leather Pusher and Telephone Girl tales and pictures were famous a decade ago.
Witwer wrote the stories, and Zanuck adapted them for short screen plays.
Witwer had an original method of composition. He carried small scratch pads
and short pencils in his pockets. If a comic idea occurred to him on the side¬
walk, at a party, in conference, in a taxicab, in a speakeasy, or anywhere else,
he would thrust his hand in his side coat pocket, make a note on the pad, tear
off the sheet, and leave the pad in readiness for the next idea. Whenever he heard
a very bright remark or a very dumb remark, Witwer’s right hand would dart
into his coat pocket. From long practice he could scribble legibly and incon¬
spicuously. After accumulating a hundred or two hundred of these notes, he
would seat himself at his desk, cover the floor around him with the slips of paper,
and start writing. When his invention lagged, he would lean over and pick up a
slip of paper. If the paper failed to suggest anything useful at the moment, he
would toss it back on the floor and pick up another. Sooner or later he would
find a note which would inspire him. Once used, the slip would be crumpled
and thrown into a waste-basket. Before Witwer had worked his way through
Alva Johnston
213
all his notes, the script would be finished. Through association with Witwer,
Zanuckbecame so expertin Leather Pusher and Telephone Girl psychology that
he was able, when illness prevented Witwer from working, to write the pic¬
tures from start to finish. Without being highly original in the comic vein,
Zanuckbecame one of the most successful writers of funny films.
Zanuck’s greatest speed record was made in cooperation with Roy Del Ruth
in a Warner Brothers picture called “Footloose Widows.” They wrote the story
and film adaptation in four days. Technically, it was an “original,” but when
Zanuck was asked where he got the idea for it, he said, “From some other film.
I forget which.” This masterpiece of speed-writing was good enough to be re¬
vived; it reappeared as “The Life of the Party,” and later as “Havana Widows.”
One catastrophe of Zanuck’s career was “Noah’s Ark,” which was made in 1927
shortly after he had become the head of Warners’ studio. It was one of those id¬
iotic super-spectacles with parallel Old Testament and Jazz Age sequences—
Moses against Scott Fitzgerald. The Ark picture was further complicated by the
coming of the talkies and had to be made as a combination of silent sequences
and uproars. The director got sick in the middle of the shooting, and Zanuck
had to take his place. “Noah’s Ark” was widely conceded to be the worst pic¬
ture ever made. However, it earned money in Europe, and Zanuck’s standing
was not hurt, especially as he made a high percentage of hits with all-talking pic¬
tures and musicals. His greatest success was the Gangster Cycle.
“I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang” is an example of Zanuck’s motion-picture
journalism. He read the book on a train eastbound from Hollywood and had
started negotiations for it by wire before reaching Chicago. Southern prison
camps were then being exposed in newspapers. The picture itself was a glori¬
fied newsreel. It was close enough to reality in its characterizations to bring some
libel suits. It was a violation of box-office rules because the boy did not get the
girl, because the fugitive remained a fugitive, and because the ending was tragic.
After experimenting successfully for three or four years with the translation
of the front pages of the daily press into motion pictures, Zanuck, with his usual
cocksureness, announced that news and contemporary sensations were extinct
as sources of picture material. Nevertheless, in his biggest hit of this year, “The
House of Rothschild,” he cuts into news obliquely from two angles. The film is
a romantic tale of events more than a century old, but it manages to be a joint
exposure of anti-Semitism and international banking.
Like many other big Hollywood figures, Zanuck enjoys having a mob of re-
tainershandy to argue with and agree with him. His retinue has included celebri¬
ties ranging from Aidan Roark, eight-goal polo-player, to Prince Mike Ro¬
manoff. Zanuck had the fake Prince under him for seven months at the Warner
Brothers studio. Mike was employed as a technical director to assist Michael Cur¬
tiz, a Hungarian genius, who reported that Romanoff was the greatest techni-
214
The Business
cal director ever known. Zanuck, according to his own account, took two
months to discover that Mike was a phony, but kept him around after that for
amusement and instruction. The greatest amusement was that of watching the
father of the Warner brothers trying to talk Russian to Mike. For six months
the elder Warner tried to start a conversation in Russian with the impostor, but
each time Romanoff bowed and slid swiftly away.
Zanuck has a keen sense of humor. His retinue includes a pal with a weak
stomach, a stomach that particularly rebels at any kind of cheese. Nothing pleases
Zanuck more than to sneak a bit of Roquefort or Limburger into the pal’s ice
cream. Anything else that makes his friend violently ill is equally acceptable to
the sunnier side of Zanuck’s nature. The producer gives full rein to his comedy
gifts when on vacation. He never allows practical jokes to interfere with work,
but on the contrary he sometimes uses practical jokes to speed up work. He per¬
petrated one on Gene Fowler in order to establish a pleasant understanding with
him. Fowler, the author of “Timber Line” and other books, is a man of preju¬
dices. One of his prejudices is a prejudice against any man who pays him a salary
running into four figures a week. He works for people like that, but will not
tolerate them personally. Anybody who hands Fowler big money and then tries
to fraternize with him is likely to be thrown over a partition. Zanuck wanted
Fowler to write a movie version of the life of Barnum and agreed to pay a huge
salary. Fowler resented this. The deal had been arranged through an agent.
Fowler had never met Zanuck, but he grew more indignant every time he
thought of him. The day came when Fowler went to work on the Twentieth
Century lot. He was ushered into Zanuck’s office and introduced. At Zanuck’s
desk sat a m an with his hat drawn down over his eyes and the first finger of his
right hand at his forehead. The man didn’t acknowledge the introduction. He
didn’t notice Fowler. He just went on thinking with his hat on. Fowler, accus¬
tomed to the bowing and scraping of magnates, was taken by surprise. He bore
the snub for a few moments and then rose, bursting with indignation. The man
at Zanuck’s desk rose at the same time, pushed his hat back, and said, “Hello,
Gene.” It was Mark Kelly, a sportswriter and close friend of Fowler. The pur¬
pose of the gag was to put Fowler in good humor and to make him forgive Zanuck
for paying him such a frightful amount of money. It effected its purpose. Dur¬
ing their entire association, Fowler treated Zanuck kindly.
George Arliss has influenced the career of Zanuck. Formerly, Zanuck was
strictly the newsman in pictures, his attention focused wholly on the present.
He had a concentration on the present like that of the late Charles F. Murphy,
boss of Tammany Hall, whose interviews consisted of one of two sentences:
“That’s past,” or “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Zanuck discov¬
ered the past when he had to find historical pictures for Arliss; in the last year
or two, he has gone wild about history and biography. When Zanuck split with
Alva Johnston
Warner Brothers and founded Twentieth Century, Arliss joined him. Arliss
was told that he was making a great error; that Zanuck was good enough for
gangster stuff, but not good enough for the quaint-old-gaffer pictures and the
Beacon-Lights-of-History pictures in which Arliss is starred. “Zanuck is an artist,”
retorted Arliss. Zanuck’s own answer to the charge of being a low-life special¬
ist was “The House of Rothschild.” According to Arliss, Zanuck is a master of
the difficult art of letting a man alone. Able writers and directors who have
worked under Zanuck have echoed this. He can interfere violently when he sees
fit, but he has a rare sense of when to let a man be.
Zanuck has not been infallible in forecasting the future of actors. He still
smarts a little because he failed to see star possibilities in Charles Farrell when
Farrell was supporting Rin-Tin-Tin in bowwow operas. Today he regards Myma
Loy as a brilliant actress. When she worked for him, he used her in slinky,
Oriental-siren parts. He cannot understand today why he failed to discover the
cleverness which she displayed in her later career. Zanuck discovered Clark
Gable, but could not interest the Warners in him. One of the Warner brothers
said, “His ears are too big;” another brother said. “He is a gangster type and gang¬
ster pictures are through.” So Zanuck was forced to release Gable, who was in¬
stantly snapped up by M-G-M. Zanuck changed Cagney from an inexpensive
hoofer into a star by one picture, “The Public Enemy.” Among others who were
boosted in their film careers by Zanuck are Warren William, Lee Tracy, and
the Mad Hatter—faced comedian, Charles Butterworth.
Zanuck weighs a hundred and twenty-eight pounds. He has a two-goal rat¬
ing as a polo-player and is respected for his gameness. A two-goal rating is not
bad for a man of small physique. Walt Disney, who is about Zanuck’s size, has
a zero rating. Zanuck does not believe in nepotism, the curse of Hollywood.
His weakness is polo; he would, they say, gladly have none but International Cup
men as filing clerks and let them name their own salaries. His national fame as
a polo-player rests largely on Arthur Caesar’s comment, “From Poland to polo
in two generations.” The fact, however, is that Zanuck, although a big man in
Hollywood, is nothing but a plain, ordinary Aryan. He is of Swiss descent on
his father’s side. His mother’s maiden name was Torpin, and he is related to a
well-known Philadelphia family of that name. Some time after the Poland-to-
polo crack by the witty Caesar (who, incidentally, is said to have, with deadly
marksmanship, insulted every man in Hollywood who was in a position to do
him any good), a genealogy of Zanuck appeared in various newspapers. It traced
him on the Torpin side to a sixteenth-century British statesman named Turpin,
whose descendants in the eighteenth century changed their name to Torpin in
order to dissociate themselves from Dick Turpin, the highwayman. Zanuck says
that he has never checked up on these historical delicacies, but they are tradi¬
tions in the family.
Cakey McWilliams
McWilliams, later and for many years editor of the Nation, wrote this socio-Jinancial-
artistic dissection of Hollywood in 1946 in Southern California Country, a title in
the American Folkways series of books on American regions, edited by Erskine Cald¬
well. It is a Marxist analysis, more interested in salaries and business methods than in the
Hollywood product itself
“The Island of Hollywood”
“You cant explain Hollywood. There isn’t any such place.
It’s just the dream suburb of Los Angeles. ”
—Rachel Field in To See Ourselves
Hollywood, as Katherine Fullerton Gerould pointed out years ago, exists only
as a state of mind, not as a geographical entity. One of the most famous place-
names in the world, Hollywood is neither a town nor a city; it is an integral part
of Los Angeles. Despite its nebulous geographical status, however, Hollywood
does exist as a community, but a community that must be defined in industrial
rather than geographical terms. The concentration of the motion-picture industry
in Los Angeles is what gives Hollywood its real identity. As Jerome Beatty once
said, Hollywood exists as “a kingless kingdom within a kingdom,” an island
within an island.
The most highly publicized industry in the world, Hollywood has been re¬
ported, for many years, by a corps of some 400 newspapermen, columnists, and
feature writers. “Only Washington,” writes Leo Rosten, “the matrix of our po¬
litical life, and New York, the nerve-center of our economic system, possess
larger press corps.” Every phase of the industry and every facet of Hollywood
life has been thoroughly reported. In fact, there is only one aspect of Hollywood
Carey McWilliams
2i7
that is germane to the perspectives of this book, namely, the relation between
Hollywood and Los Angeles. Is there an interacting influence between these
communities? Where and how does the one community impinge upon the other?
1. The Colony Phase
Originally the motion-picture colony was located in the Edendale district of Los
Angeles, not in the suburb of Hollywood. The first motion-picture producers
were attracted to Los Angeles, according to local tradition, by reports of the
wide varieties of scenery to be found in the region. While producing motion
pictures in New York, David Horsley is supposed to have read John Steven Mc-
Groarty’s roseate descriptions of scenic Southern California and to have con¬
cluded that there was the place to make pictures. In point of fact, however, the
first producers who came to Los Angeles were fugitives—from process servers
and the patent trust. Seeking to evade injunctions, they wanted to be as far from
New York and as close to the Mexican border as possible. It is true that once
located in Los Angeles they found the climate ideally adapted to the making of
motion pictures. For within a two-hundred-mile radius of Los Angeles was to
be found every variety of natural scenery from the Sahara Desert to the Khyber
Pass. There was also available in Los Angeles an abundant supply of cheap labor.
But these discoveries were accidental by-products of the main purpose which
was to elude the patent trust.
Always looking over their shoulders for process servers, the first motion-
picture “people” did not live in Los Angeles; they merely camped in the com¬
munity, prepared, like Arabs, to fold their tents and steal away in the night. An
impudent, troublesome, harum-scarum lot, they were regarded in Los Angeles
as an unmitigated nuisance. In the period from 1908 to 1912, Los Angeles was
still in its sedate and stuffy phase, a self-righteous and pious community. From
the day that Colonel William N. Selig started shooting The Count of Monte Cristo
in 1908, Los Angeles took an aggressively hostile attitude toward the new nick¬
elodeon and peepshow industry. As Gene Fowler has pointed out, Colonel
Selig’s cowboys were hired on their ability to whoop as well as to ride. “The
whooping put them in the proper mood. They also whooped while off the set
and did some shooting at bar fixtures and in the palm-lined lanes. The citizens
didn’t like this racket and were sure the good Colonel Selig had cloven hooves
and that his men wore tall sombreros to make room for horns.” The churchgo¬
ing townspeople of Los Angeles spoke of the studios as “camps” and the motion-
picture people as “the movie colony.”
During the camp phase of the industry, cameramen shot scenes wherever and
whenever they wished: in Westlake Park, on street comers, in residential dis-
2 I 8
The Business
tricts. Never bothering to build sets, the producers improvised the background
and setting, and made up the stories as they went along. Housewives were con¬
stantly infuriated by the ringing of doorbells and traffic was forever being snarled
up by the shooting of street scenes. The curiously assorted characters who made
up the colony were segregated like lepers in Los Angeles. “Over no decent
threshold,” writes Cedric Belfrage, “were they allowed to step. They were unfit
to mingle with respectable citizens.” Apartment houses and four-family flats soon
carried signs reading: “No Dogs or Actors Allowed.” Living in out-of-the-way
rooming houses and hotels, they spent their leisure hours at the Vernon Night
Club and other alcoholic oases in the outlying districts. When they began to in¬
vade Hollywood, “the most beautiful suburb of America,” they were similarly
ostracized.
From the Edendale section near Elysian Park, the colony moved to Holly¬
wood in 1911, when Al Christie, and David and Bill Horsley rented the old
Blondeau Tavern at Gower and Sunset one day and began shooting a film the
next. Just why Hollywood should have been chosen remains something of a mys¬
tery. Founded by Horace W. Wilcox, a Kansas prohibitionist, Hollywood was
incorporated in 1903 with an adult population of 166 residents. On the eve of
its invasion by the motion-picture industry, Hollywood had surrendered its
legal status, “but not its well-earned identity,” by voting, in 1910, to join the
City of Los Angeles. “An obscure and dusty suburb,” it had a population of 4,000
in 1911 and a reputation as a center of piety and respectability. Resenting the
motion-picture invasion, the residents of Hollywood finally succeeded, in 1919,
in forcing the City of Los Angeles to enact zoning ordinances which restricted
studios to seven prescribed areas. In fact, Hollywood was up in arms against the
invading gypsy bands from 1911 until the opening of The Birth of a Nation, the
first great premiere at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles on February 8, 1915.
After 1915 both Hollywood and Los Angeles began to experience a change
of attitude toward the motion-picture industry. From a suburb of 4,000 popu¬
lation, Hollywood had grown to a community of 36,000 by 1920 (and to
235,000 by 1930). Mary Pickford was earning $1,000 a week in 1913; Jesse
Lasky and Cecil B. De Mille had arrived the same year; and Charles Chaplin had
gone to work at the Keystone lot for $ 1 jo a week, and, within two years, was
earning $10,000 a week. With an annual payroll of $20,000,000 in 1915, the
movies had arrived. Hollywood began to accept the colony and even to regard
a few of its members, such as Cecil and William De Mille, Mary Pickford,
Douglas Fairbanks, and Theodore Roberts, as among its leading citizens. The
strenuous effort which the motion-picture people put forth in support of the war,
in the years from 1916 to 1918, helped to bridge the gap between the industry
and the community.
As the movies passed from their colony phase to their purple period, how-
Carey McWilliams
219
ever, a series of events served to widen the breach. The Fatty Arbuckle case,
the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the death of Wallace Reid, the mur¬
der (?) of Thomas Ince, and the shooting of Courtland Dines by the chauffeur
of Mabel Normand (whose name had figured so prominently in the Taylor case),
momentarily crystallized the earlier opposition and the movies were, once again,
on the defensive. Forming the Motion Picture Producers Association, the pro¬
ducers retained Will (“Deacon”) Hays to launch a clean-up campaign. A morals
clause was written in all actors’ contracts, detectives were hired to scrutinize
the private lives of the stars, and the purple period came to an abrupt end.
The circus-and-camival atmosphere completely vanished when sound was first
introduced in 1925. Tourists and visitors were not welcome in the new double-
walled, soundproof studios. Location trips were reduced to a minimum and the
movies became an indoor industry. Before sound was introduced, well-known
actors and actresses could be seen throughout the city, on the streets and on lo¬
cation. But after 1925 guides began to put up signs along the boulevards offer¬
ing to take tourists on a tour of the studios and to point out the homes of the
stars. The carnival atmosphere survived only in the gaudy premieres with their
blazing klieg lights. At about the same time, the stars began to scatter to the Hol¬
lywood hills, to Bel-Air, to Beverly Hills, and, somewhat later, to San Fernando
Valley. By 1930 there was not a single star or director of the first rank living in
Hollywood. The exodus of the studios had begun even earlier, in 1922. Today
there are only three studios in the Hollywood area. Acquiring social respectability
with the introduction of sound, the movies proceeded to wall the industry off
from the rest of the community. Once the retreat to the lots had been made,
the earlier, tenuous, and always troubled relation between “Hollywood” and the
rest of Los Angeles was terminated and a new relationship began to develop.
2. So Near and Yet So Far
The geographical area known as Hollywood extends from the summit of the Hol¬
lywood hills on the north to Beverly Boulevard on the south; from Hoover Street
on the east, to Doheny Drive on the west. When other communities have threat¬
ened to appropriate the name Hollywood, the merchants and business men in
this district have always raised an enormous rumpus and promptly threatened
lawsuits. This is Hollywood, the suburb; Hollywood, the business and residen¬
tial district. No longer the center of the motion-picture industry for any pur¬
pose, it is nevertheless a distinct community. A district of apartment houses and
hotels, it has perhaps the highest occupancy turnover of any section of mobile
Los Angeles. With relatively few old people and children, the population pyra¬
mid for the district is narrow at both extremes. According to the editor of Dog
210
The Business
World, Hollywood is the “doggiest area” in California, which, in turn, is “the dog¬
giest state in the union.” Here, as Rachel Field observed, the residents belong
“to an unchartered free-masonry, whose badge is the leash and stick, and whose
password is a word or look of mutual admiration.” Here “dog status has been
elevated to a high plane,” with “a marked canine class distinction being every¬
where apparent.” Here live the hangers-on of the industry; its carpenters,
painters, and machinists; its hordes of extras. Hollywood is, as Horace McCoy
once said, perhaps the most “terrifying town” in America: lonely, insecure, full
of marginal personalities, people just barely able to make ends meet; a place of
opportunists and confidence men, petty chiselers and racketeers, bookies and
race-track touts; of people desperately on the make. Once the main thorough¬
fare of the motion picture colony, Hollywood Boulevard is today a rather run¬
down tourist alley, lined with curio shops, used bookstores, hobby shops,
motion-picture theaters, and mediocre stores. The center of the district is Hol¬
lywood and Vine, where, of course, you are almost sure to meet some one you
know. When visiting British novelists, no longer on contract with the industry,
denounce and revile Hollywood, it is this abandoned center of the industry—
this geographical entity—that they usually have in mind. It is, indeed, as James
Rorty once observed, a place of careerism and sycophancy, whose favorite word
is phony, a place that suggests “the meretricious, derivative eloquence of the
mocking birds” that haunt the ragged dusty palms of its bungalow courts.
But this district is not Hollywood. The community of Hollywood is made up
of the people engaged in the production of motion pictures, few of whom live
in this area. Where motion pictures are made, there is Hollywood. For unde¬
niably there is a Hollywood community in the sense that the people engaged in
the production of pictures have the center, the focus, of their lives in the industry
and are bound together by the nature of the industry itself. Living over wide
areas of Los Angeles, “picture people,” and the phrase indicates their group-
identity, constitute their own community, separate and distinct from the neigh¬
borhoods in which they reside and quite apart from Los Angeles proper. The
relationship between this Hollywood and the rest of Los Angeles is, therefore,
essentially symbiotic. When a resident of Los Angeles enters the motion-picture
industry, he disappears almost as completely as though he had moved across the
continent. “The world of movie stars,” writes Frank Fenton, “was only across
the hills and yet it was as far as the sun.”
A world within a world, Hollywood-the-social-entity is a rigidly stratified
community. The elite of the industry is made up of three strata: the two hun¬
dred or more individuals who make in excess of $75^,000 a year, the junior elite
who make from $2j,ooo to $ go,000 a year, and the lesser elite who make from
$ 10,000 to $ 1 j, 000 a year. Beneath the elite are the “workers” of the industry:
the craftsmen, the white-collar office workers, the skilled and unskilled labor-
Carey McWilliams
221
ers. The elite live outside Hollywood in Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel-Air, Santa
Monica, the Hollywood Hills, and San Fernando Valley. Following the hierar¬
chical structure of the industry itself, the communities in which picture people
live have been perfectly zoned, as Scott Fitzgerald noted, “so you know exactly
what kind of people economically live in each section, from executives and di¬
rectors, through technicians in their bungalows, right down to the extras.” So¬
cial rank in the industry is precisely graded in relation to income and fluctuates,
as quickly and as sensitively as a barometer, with each change in earning capac¬
ity. The social barometer, however, only records changes within the industry.
Once a person’s relation with the industry is severed, he is automatically ex¬
cluded from the Hollywood community, with rare exceptions, regardless of his
income or the size of his fortune.
Highly stratified internally, Hollywood is nonetheless still a community. For
the people who make up the industry, from the lowliest extra to Louis B. Mayer,
all identify themselves with Hollywood and belong to a world of their own. How¬
ever widely they may be separated on the social ladder of the industry, picture
people still possess a strong sense of group-identity. Set apart from their fellow
citizens of Los Angeles, even from those of a similar or comparable social rat¬
ing, they think of themselves as a part of Hollywood. To be in pictures, in
whatever capacity, denotes a vague and indefinable status, but one which is
universally recognized.
This sense of community identification may be variously illustrated. The
motion-picture industry has always had its own employer organizations, sepa¬
rate and apart from the Merchants and Manufacturers Association and Southern
Californians, Incorporated. While most of the Hollywood trade unions are af¬
filiated with the A.F. of L. and have representatives on the Los Angeles Central
Labor Council, they have always felt more closely identified with Hollywood
than with Los Angeles. The present-day Conference of Studio Unions is, in ef¬
fect, a kind of Hollywood Central Labor Council. Such organizations as the Stu¬
dio Club and the Motion Picture Relief Association also indicate the existence
of a separate institutional life. Both the employers and the employees of the in¬
dustry have their own separate political organizations. When Hollywood con¬
tributes to China Relief or Russian War Relief or to the Red Cross, it does so
as Hollywood, that is, as the motion-picture industry.
The main studio lots are walled towns, each with its principal thoroughfares,
sidestreets, and alleys. On the lot people work together, live together, eat to¬
gether. With from two to three thousand employees, each lot is a community
in itself. Occupying from thirty to forty acres of land, each lot has its own of¬
fice buildings; its factories (the stages); its theaters and projection rooms; its lab¬
oratories, dressmaking shops, blacksmith shops, machine shops, wardrobes,
restaurants, dressing rooms, lumber sheds; greenhouses; scene docks; electri-
222
The Business
cal plant; garages; and planing mills. No one has ever precisely defined a motion-
picture lot. It is neither a factory nor a business establishment nor yet a company
town. Rather it is more in the nature of a community, a beehive, or, as Otis Fer¬
guson said, “fairy-land on aproduction line.” The analogy to a factory is destroyed
by the bewildering variety of crafts and skills, the ever-changing personnel, and
the fact that, while the production process is always the same, each “production”
is separately organized and is, to some extent, a separate product. To call an
industry which, in 1939, made only 376 major products, or feature pictures, a
mass-production factory is to ignore abasic distinction. Each production involves
a different cast, not merely of actors, but of directors, producers, and, to some
extent, even of business executives and office and lot employees. Unlike the typ¬
ical mass-production factory, production lacks continuity and employment lacks
stability. People are constantly “in” and “out” of pictures. While personnel shifts
from lot to lot and from studio to studio, picture people, however, continue to
work in the same industry, in the same community.
On and off the lots, picture people associate with picture people: the elite
with the elite, the junior elite with the junior elite, the craftsmen with the
craftsmen, and even the office employees with other office employees in the same
industry. It could even be shown that a surprisingly large number of picture peo¬
ple have married within the industry. Living in different sections of the city, the
three elite categories, and, to some extent, even the lower-bracket employees,
frequent the same shopping districts and seldom come to Los Angeles. A friend
of mine, a writer, boasts that he has not been east of Western Avenue for fif¬
teen years except to catch a train. The elite elements employ Hollywood busi¬
ness agents, retain Hollywood lawyers, and consult Hollywood physicians. They
are protected, not merely by studio walls, but by a cordon of secretaries, man¬
agers, and agents from the rest of the community. They deal with Los Angeles,
in fact, through these representatives, having few primary contacts with the out¬
side world. Motion-picture people frequent the same mountain, beach, or desert
resorts. Once a particular resort has been invaded by non-picture people, the
movie folk promptly shift their patronage elsewhere. They are always just one
step ahead of the Angelenos. When it becomes difficult to protect themselves
from the rest of Southern California, they will even form their own corpora¬
tions to acquire a particular mountain resort or desert hotel for their exclusive
patronage. Some years ago, for example, the upper-bracket elite toyed with the
idea of forming an Inner Circle Club as a means of segregating themselves from
“the assistant directors and the $3oo-a-week writers.” A special mezzanine was
to have been provided where the elite, as the brochure announcing the project
stated, “could be a part of, but still removed from, the crowd.”
Motion-picture people even use, as Otis Ferguson reported, the same “clipped
and extravagant speech.” They patronize the same tailors and the same golf
Carey McWilliams
223
courses, attend the fights only on “movie night,” and are always seen at the same
cafes, night clubs, and restaurants. “TheTrocadero was the place to be seen that
season,” observes a character in Budd Schulberg’s novel, What Makes Sammy
Run? and another character comments, “What always amazes me is that with all
the turn-over in Hollywood from year to year, almost from month to month,
the faces never seem to change.” Picture people exhibit many similar affecta¬
tions, use the same idioms, and, even in playing poker and betting on the races,
show the same remarkable clannishness. While Variety and The Reporter are avidly
read, the local press is ignored except for the gossip columns and the special Hol¬
lywood “society” sections. To some extent this clannishness is largely defensive,
a means of protection against salesmen, bores, and bums seeking to make a touch.
But it also indicates the centripetal force of the industry itself. “Everyone be¬
longed to the films,” observed Vicki Baum, “or was non-existent.” “Out here,”
wrote Ward Morehouse in 1942, “you’re sucked into a community life you have
no feeling for.”
In large part, the notorious cleavage between Hollywood and Los Angeles
may be traced to the absorbing nature of employment in the motion-picture in¬
dustry. A writer who is currently receiving $1,000 a week, who has made a
down-payment on a $ 2 5,000 home, and whose option is about to expire, is about
as engrossed with motion pictures as it is possible for a person to be with any
single topic. He lives, breathes, and talks nothing but picture ideas. He may not
like his work, he may loathe his particular assignment, but concentration on his
work precludes the likelihood of his being interested in people who do not share
a similar preoccupation. Instinctively, he turns in his leisure moments, such as
they are, to people in the same or a similar predicament, who speak the same
language, laugh at the same jokes, and appreciate the same personal anecdotes.
Although his net earnings over a period of time may not be great, his scale of
pay, while he is working, is such as to place him in a different category from
those with whom he formerly associated. A man who is earning $7^0 or $ 1,000
a week, although he may only be employed for six or eight weeks in the year,
lives a very different life from a man who regularly makes $6,000 a year. It should
be noted, however, that to be in pictures can mean that one merely occupies a
marginal relation to the industry, for example, the favorite bootlegger in pro¬
hibition days, a book salesman, or a well-known bookie or poker player. Re¬
ferring to one of the characters in his novel, Scott Fitzgerald wrote that “she was
of the movies but not in them.” (Italics mine.)
The symbiotic relation between the two communities has been of great value
to both. For Hollywood it has created a set of special prestige values long ex¬
pertly exploited; for Los Angeles it has invested the proximity to Hollywood,
the tantalizing “so near and yet so far” relationship, with a commercial value that
can be weighed, measured, and capitalized. For example, if the motion-picture
22 4
The Business
industry had merged with the rest of the community, it would long ago have
become impossible to place a special premium on motion-picture patronage. But,
under the existing relationship, Hollywood patronage of a particular shop or cafe
or hotel or bar or art gallery can be made to pay dividends. Having the indus¬
try sequestered from the rest of the community has made possible the world¬
wide exploitation of the name Hollywood, which, in turn, has drawn thousands
of people and vast sums of money to the region. To vulgarize the concept, it has
made possible the distillation of a pure essence, Hollywood, used to sell clothes,
real estate, ideas, books, jewelry, furniture, cold creams, deodorants, and per¬
fume.
3. An Island Industry
God has always smiled on Southern California; a special halo has always encir¬
cled this island on the land. Consider, for example, the extraordinary good luck
in having the motion-picture industry concentrated in Los Angeles. The lead¬
ing industry of Los Angeles from 1920 to 1940, motion pictures were made to
fit the economic requirements and physical limitations of the region like a glove.
Here was one industry, perhaps the only industry in America, that required no
raw materials, for which discriminatory freight rates were meaningless, and
which, at the same time, possessed an enormous payroll. Employing from thirty
to forty thousand workers, the industry in 1939 spent about $ 190,000,000 in
the manufacture of films and of this total $89,884,841 represented salaries,
$41,096,226, wages, and only $31,118,277 was spent on such supplies as film,
fuel and energy, and miscellaneous items. Today Los Angeles is an industrial
community, but it was only beginning to become industrialized when the movies
appeared as a providential dispensation. To this island community of the West,
motion pictures have attracted perhaps more people than they have ever em¬
ployed and more capital than they have ever invested. They provided the com¬
munity with precisely what it needed, payrolls, purchasing power—a simulated
industrial base. Like the region itself, this key industry is premised upon im¬
provisation, a matter of make-believe, a synthesis of air and wind and water. T o
J. B. Priestley, Southern California was “impermanent and brittle as a reel of
film” and to Rupert Hughes the mountains rimming the region are “as unreal as
flats of stage scenery, stage pieces.” Approached from any point of view, there
is an extraordinary affinity between the industry and its Southern California set-
ting '
Not only was the industry precisely of the character that the community
needed and made to meet its basic weaknesses, but it has always been essentially
monopolistic in the twofold sense, first, that it is monopolistically controlled,
Carey McWilliams
and, second, that it is concentrated in the region. Just as the region itself is
separated from the rest of the nation by a wall of mountains and desert, so the
industry is barricaded against competition. Ninety per cent of all the films pro¬
duced in the United States are made in Hollywood. While this circumstance has
probably militated against a proper circulation of competitive ideas in the mak¬
ing of motion pictures, it has been a godsend to Southern California. For it has
anchored in the region an industry partially protected against the ups and the
downs of the business cycle. Movies are apparently a necessary luxury, slow to
feel cuts in the family budget, for they continued to attract large patronage
throughout the depression. The advertising value of the industry to the region
simply cannot be estimated. It has certainly advertised Los Angeles more effec¬
tively than the All-Year Club of Southern California, an organization that has
spent millions on exploitation. What could be more desirable than a monopo¬
listic non-seasonal industry with 50,000,000 customers, an industry without soot
or grime, without blast furnaces or dynamos, an industry whose production
shows peaks but few valleys?
Motion pictures have also stimulated the development of literally hundreds
of subsidiary, if minor, industries. According to Mae D. Huettig’s study, Warner
Brothers Pictures, Inc., lists 108 subsidiaries, including a film laboratory,
Brunswick Radio Corporation, a lithographing concern, a concern that makes
theater accessories, ten music publishing houses, real-estate companies, book¬
ing agencies, several broadcasting corporations, a cellulose products company,
a television company, recording studios, and dozens of additional corporations.
Not all of these subsidiary concerns, of course, are located in Southern Califor¬
nia, but most of them are located here. Motion pictures have stimulated the ex¬
pansion of service trades, the clerical categories, and the professions. If the
figures were available, it could be easily demonstrated that a staggering amount
of motion-picture money has been invested in a wide variety of enterprises in
Southern California. The location of the film industry in Los Angeles has, in turn,
resulted in a somewhat similar concentration of radio broadcasting. Today more
than twenty-five national radio shows originate in Hollywood. In 1938 the six
Hollywood radio stations spent more than $ 18,000,000 and paid out, to 600
film stars, more than $5,000,000. If ever an industry played the Fairy Prince to
an impoverished Cinderella, it has been the motion-picture industry in relation
to Los Angeles.
Here was an industry insulated against competition; requiring no raw mate¬
rials other than film, a little lumber, a little grease paint, and a considerable
amount of electrical energy; an industry whose product, a roll of film, could be
shipped anywhere in the world for almost nothing; but which, at the same time,
poured forth an enormous sum in payrolls and expenditures. In 1938 motion
pictures ranked fourteenth among American industries by volume of business
226
The Business
and eleventh in total assets. Ironically enough, it is the one industry that has not
been lured to Los Angeles and that has had to fight for its right to exist in the
community. No one can possibly appraise the value of this industry to Los An¬
geles. Only of recent years has Los Angeles become an important furniture and
clothes-manufacturing center. In the manufacture of sportswear, it already oc¬
cupies an unrivaled position. In both instances, the location of the film industry
was an important accelerating factor. Hollywood is an all-important dateline and
an equally important trademark.
4. Smoked Glasses and Fur Coats
When the industry first came to Southern California, its camps or colonies were
scattered about the region. Pictures were made in San Diego, Santa Barbara,
Santa Monica, and Inceville, an abandoned colony located north of Santa Mon¬
ica. While climatic considerations account for the location of the industry in
Southern California, they do not account for its concentration in Los Angeles.
Santa Barbara, for example, enjoys a slightly improved variety of the same cli¬
mate as Los Angeles, while San Diego has more sunshine than any community
in the region. How did it happen, therefore, that, within such a short time, all
of the companies were concentrated in Los Angeles?
In part the explanation is functional; the manufacture of films is essentially
the business of an industry rather than of any particular company. Unquestion¬
ably many conveniences result from the concentration of the industry within a
fifteen-mile radius of Hollywood. But there is a more basic explanation, sug¬
gested by Ross Wills when he observed that Hollywood “is not America at all,
but it is all America. It is Bangor, Maine, in intimate embrace with San Diego,
California.” An industry that must somehow reflect and appeal to all America
must also be tied to its customers by some social and psychological nexus.
Movies were drawn to “the enormous village” of Los Angeles as pieces of metal
to a magnet. For here was the great domestic melting pot, a place which, as Mor¬
ris Markey has said, “manifests in many ways a remarkable exaggeration of all
those things which we are wont to call typically American.” Here, in fact, was
all America, America in flight from itself, America on an island. And here, of
course, was the logical place to raise the big tent of the institutionalized circus
which is the motion-picture industry.
Here, too, were to be found the variety of types, the loose social controls,
the bigness of the city with the sucker-mindedness of the village; here in short
was the kind of community in which a circus industry could take root. If one
will momentarily forget climatic considerations, it becomes extremely difficult
to imagine the growth of the motion-picture industry in Pittsburgh (too highly
Carey McWilliams
227
industrialized); or in New England (too much out of the main stream of Amer¬
ican life); or in the South (too provincial, too backward). The industry required
a location in which it could develop and function independently of community
controls. In order to provide mass entertainment, the movies had to have social
elbow-room, a factor best appraised in light of the strenuous opposition they
encountered even in Los Angeles. What the industry required, in the way of
mores, was a frontier town forever booming; a community kept currently
typical-American by constant migration. The industry could easily have been sti¬
fled by a rigid social strait jacket. And, in this connection, it is quite beside the
point to urge that the industry might have profited, in the long run, by being
located in a half-dozen different cities, or to bewail the fact that it became con¬
centrated in such a socially irresponsible community as Los Angeles.
By its partially self-imposed, partially externally coerced, isolation in Los An¬
geles, the motion-picture industry has profoundly influenced the culture of
the region. Having said as much, however, I hasten to add that it is not always
an easy task to trace this influence or to isolate the factors involved. One en¬
counters the same difficulty here that others have faced in trying to define the
influence of the movies on American culture. But there is this difference: Los
Angeles is not only a moviegoing community, but a community in which movies
are made. Outside Los Angeles, as Lillian Symes has pointed out, the influence
of Hollywood “is diluted by the intenser realities of everyday experience. The
rest of the world gets the shadow, not the essence of Hollywood.”
In the field of manners and morals, Hollywood has certainly liberated Los An¬
geles from the sillier rituals of middle-class life. The Los Angeles that I first knew
in 1922 has, in these respects, undergone a complete transformation. As late as
1922, Los Angeles was a center of Comstockism and Fundamentalism. During
the ’twenties, the Rev. Robert P. Shuler, bom in a log cabin in the Blue Ridge
Mountains, a graduate of Elm Creek Academy, rose to great power in South¬
ern California, the “boss” of its ethics, politics, and morals. At one time his radio
audience was estimated to be the largest religious radio audience in the world.
Zealot and fanatic, he unseated a mayor, a district attorney, and numerous po¬
lice chiefs and was himself nearly elected to the United States Senate. Annoyed
by the scientists at the Calif omia Institute of Technology, Reverend Shuler once
organized a revival meeting in Pasadena, at which the Rev. Arthur I. Brown spoke
on “Men, Monkeys, and Missing Links”; the Rev. Harry Rimmer on “Evolution
Unmasked”; and Dr. Gerald B. Winrod, the native fascist of later years, “The
Mark of the Beast.” Three weeks after this meeting, the people of Southern Cal¬
ifornia, by a vote of three to one, ordered the King James version of the Bible
placed in the public schools of California (the measure was, however, defeated
by the upstate vote). Today Shuler, now in the camp of Gerald L. K. Smith, is
just another “preacher” and it would be utterly impossible to stampede the peo-
228
The Business
pie of the region in the direction of Comstockism. How much of this change can
be attributed to motion pictures, I do not know, but the movies have certainly
been a major influence.
The movies have unquestionably affected the appearance of the region. “They
may be blamed,” writes Richard Neutra, “for many phenomena in this landscape
such as: half-timbered English peasant cottages, French provincial and ‘mission-
bell’ type adobes, Arabian minarets, Georgian mansions on jo by i 2o foot lots
with ‘Mexican Ranchos’ adjoining them on sites of the same size.” The interi¬
ors reflect the same movie-inspired eclectic confusion: modernistically pat¬
terned wallpaper, adzed and exposed ceiling beams, Norman fireplaces,
machine-made Persian rugs, cheap Chippendale imitations, and an array of
“pickings and tidbits from all historical and geographical latitudes and longitudes.”
These buildings are not constructed as they appear to be, but are built like sets,
with two by fours covered with black paper, chickenwire, and brittle plaster or
occasionally brick veneer, and are covered with “a multitude of synthetically col¬
ored roofing materials.” Much of the construction resembles, or actually copies,
the type of construction used in the making of sets, that is, buildings are built
for a momentary effect and completely lack a sense of time or permanence.
Nearly every visitor to the region has commented on its resemblance to a
motion-picture set. “The city seems,” writes Paul Schrecker, “not like a real city
resulting from natural growth, but like an agglomeration of many variegated
movie sets, which stand alongside one another but have no connection with one
another.” “Hollywood,” writes Aldous Huxley, “always seems like a movie set.
Everything is very pretty but the houses, which I think are charming, look im¬
permanent, as though they might be tom down at any moment and something
else put up.” “It is all made of papier-mache,” complained Morris Markey,
“everything—the filling stations, the studios, the mansions, and even the
churches with their Neon signs gleaming among Gothic turrets. It’s all just a
movie set.”
To appreciate the influence of Hollywood on Los Angeles it is important to
note the timing: motion pictures arrived just when the community was begin¬
ning to assume the dimensions of a city. Had the movies arrived at an earlier,
or even at a later date, it is doubtful if their influence would have been so pro¬
nounced. Coming when they did, as Lillian Symes has pointed out, “the Holly¬
wood sophistication was painlessly absorbed because it was, after all, little more
than Iowa-on-the-loose.” Lacking socially prominent first families or deeply
rooted social traditions, Los Angeles quickly adopted the motion-picture elite
as its arbiters of taste and style. Although the movie elite moved in a world of
their own, this world was all the more conspicuous for having the spotlight riv¬
eted on its isolated, stage-like gyrations. Hence the movies came to set the tone
of opinion in style and taste, manner of living, and attitudes. In other words,
Los Angeles imitated Hollywood.
Carey McWilliams
229
Elsewhere in America, the nouveaux riches have generally been under some
mild restraint of settled custom, inherited wealth, or social tradition. But in the
Los Angeles of the ’twenties, the extravagant, child-like tastes of the motion-
picture elite were imitated at a dozen different socio-economic levels. The Cin¬
derella attraction that the industry has exerted on all America has been greatly
magnified in Los Angeles. To employ some dreadful terms, much of the “beauty
consciousness” of the industry, its preoccupation with aesthetic effect (however
hideous the result), its “glamour,” its “slickness,” have, to some extent, perme¬
ated the rest of the community. Motion-picture techniques of advertising have
been widely copied; for example, produce markets are opened with a display
of klieg lights and all the pomp and circumstance of a premiere. Attendants in
drive-in restaurants dress like usherettes in movie theaters. The immodesty of
the industry is reflected in a hundred different ways and nuances, impossible to
document but easily recognizable. Los Angeles has imitated the speech man¬
nerisms of Hollywood, its slapstick humor, its informality of existence, and its
eccentricity of manner and speech, dress, and mode of living. Here, as Jerome
Beatty pointed out, “the signs are bigger and redder, the shops look like mov¬
ing picture sets, the automobiles run more to nickel trimmings and cream-
colored bodies, the girls are more beautiful, and there are more goofy-looking
men. Hollywood Boulevard blares at you, and nearly every other person seems
to be trying to make himself conspicuous. Beauty shops ballyhoo a jar of cold
cream as though it were a behemoth. The average grocer would rather be known
as a ‘showman’ than as a man who knows his groceries.” The “conscious facti¬
tiousness” of Hollywood has ever been imitated by the churches and temples of
the region. Something of the same influence, of course, can be noticed across
the nation, but in Los Angeles it stands forth in bold relief.
£. Hollywood Case History
He lived in a fashionable apartment on Sunset Boulevard and over his boulevard
shop appeared the caption “Paul Wharton, Couturier.” No one knew much
about him. He liked to propagate conflicting stories about his parentage. On oc¬
casion, he liked to imagine himself the son of fabulously wealthy Montana peo¬
ple, or again he would announce that his parents were Chinese, or, to others,
he would say that his parents had gone down on the Titanic. He was bom, how¬
ever, in Billings, Montana, in 1909. Reporters described him, at the time of his
death, as “a fragile, dark-haired youth, with dark, heavy-lidded, amative eyes,
almost Oriental in quality.” In 1926 this strange creature, so like a character out
of Firbank or Van Vechten, began his Los Angeles career as a designer of pageants
at Angelus Temple. Later, he moved westward along the boulevard and became
a fashionable designer. At one time he was arrested for narcotic addiction and
2 jo The Business
was released at the behest of Mrs. McPherson. The sharp cleavage in his men¬
tal life was revealed in his eccentric behavior. Once, while having tea in Bev¬
erly Hills, he casually slipped a diamond ring of his hostess on his finger, and,
despite her protests, walked off with it. The next day he announced that the ring
had been stolen. And for this affair he was again arrested. On an April night, in
the year 19 3 £, he was found murdered in his apartment. He had been reading,
during the evening, two detective stories, The Killing of Judge McFarland and The
Second Shot. At the time his murder was widely reported, no one seemed to no¬
tice that his career was thoroughly typical of the period, 19 2 6— 19 3 3, and of the
place, Hollywood. One could fill an encyclopedia with biographies of the Paul
Whartons of Hollywood.
6 . The Breach Narrows
With the introduction of sound, the amount of capital invested in the motion-
picture industry rapidly increased; between 1926 and 1933 the capital invest¬
ment doubled. Hollywood became Big Business almost overnight. Eight major
producing companies swiftly came to dominate the industry and five of these
companies are today fully integrated, that is, they make, distribute, and exhibit
motion pictures. Of the 9 2 companies engaged in the production of films in
1939, the eight “majors” released 3 96 or 8 2% of the 48 3 full-length feature films
and received 33 % of the gross income. The five integrated companies now own
2,600 theaters or 16% of the total. Through their control of these deluxe first-
run theaters, they exercise a dominating influence in the distribution field. With
more capital required, the major film companies became affiliated with or were
financed by such concerns as the Westem Electric Company, the American Tele¬
phone and Telegraph Company, the Chase National Bank, the House of Mor¬
gan, and the Radio Corporation of America.
The year sound was introduced, the Central Casting Corporation was formed
to rationalize the employment of extras. Previously extras had applied for work
at the rate of 4,000 an hour, but, by 1936, the extra work was divided among
2 2,937 employees and the number continued to decline: 13,936 in 1937; 8,887
in 1938; 7,007 in 1940. With the introduction of sound, a sharp wedge was
driven between the actors and the extras. The average annual earnings of tech¬
nicians, which was $2,463 in 1929, dropped to $1,767 in 1933, while in 1937
studio painters, carpenters, and plasterers were averaging $ 1,300 a year. With
industrial maturity came internal division on class lines. At the same time, sec¬
tions of the Hollywood labor movement began to identify themselves with the
Los Angeles labor movement and the schism between the two communities
began to narrow.
Carey McWilliams
23i
Efforts to organize the industry date from 1916, but it was not until November
29, 1926, that the first basic studio agreement was executed. With the New Deal
program, the writers, actors, publicists, story analysts, directors, and the other
crafts and skills, quickly organized. Today Hollywood is a union labor town, from
the miscellaneous service employees to the highest paid writers, actors, and di¬
rectors. Organization has not been achieved, however, without a long and bit¬
ter struggle. It took the Screen Writers Guild five years to secure a contract after
they had organized. For the tycoons who rule the industry have “grown up” with
motion pictures and, like similar industrialists in other fields, have a fixed no¬
tion that the industry is theirs to boss and to rule as they see fit. Resourceful
strategists, they have fought the unionization of the industry by every trick and
stratagem known to American employers. The Hollywood guilds and unions
have long had to contend with more than the usual number of employer “stooges”
and “yes men,” the individuals who in 19 3 j formed the Hollywood Hussars (see
my article in The Nation, May 29, 1935) and who today control the Motion Pic¬
ture Alliance.
The beginning of a conscious rapprochement between Hollywood and Los
Angeles dates from the formation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936
and the formation, in May, 1938, of the Studio Committee for Democratic
Political Action. The impetus for the latter movement came from within the
industry itself. At the time of the Epic campaign in 1934, the politically unor¬
ganized employees of the industry were caught offguard. Using undisguised com¬
pulsion, the tycoons of the industry forced these employees to contribute to the
Republican Party campaign fund. But in 1938 the employees took the initiative,
formed their own political organization, and were an important factor in the elec¬
tion of Governor Olson. Since 1938 the political importance of Hollywood has
increased with every election.
Through their anti-fascist, trade-union, and political activities, the employ¬
ees of the industry have now been brought into intimate collaboration with the
people of Los Angeles. Nowadays no committee is complete which does not
include representatives from the Hollywood arts and crafts, and Hollywood is
included, as a matter of course, in all social and political projects of a liberal na¬
ture. This general leftward tendency of the Holly woodians has been luridly re¬
ported by Martin Dies and John Rankin and clumsily satirized by professional
informers, notorious renegades, and the usual witnesses who appeared before
the Dies Committee. Much fun has been poked at high-salaried stars occupying
“box seats at the barricades” and at the spectacle of “Stalin Over Hollywood.”
While the influx of liberal ideas has not been without its amusing sidelights, it
would be a grave mistake, indeed, to write off this ferment as a mere fashion of
the moment or as another manifestation of the exhibitionism of a community of
actors. Hollywood will never again be a big happy family. The tensions which
232 The Business
have developed in the industry, briefly noted in this section, were clearly out¬
lined in Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Last Tycoon, which, if he had lived to finish
it, would have shown that the Hollywood tycoons are really our last tycoons and
that their control of this all-important medium for the communication of ideas
is already on the wane. Fugitives and runaways, the early producers and their
latter-day successors are no longer beyond the reach of democratic processes.
Even Hollywood has repeated the quotation from John Donne made famous by
Ernest Hemingway: “No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece
of the Continent, a part of the maine.”
Sam Arkoff
Sam Arkoff and James Nicholson were the kings of Hollywood exploitation pictures from
the 19SOs until the 1970s; their American International Studios gave many big names
(Coppola, Scorsese, Nicholson) their starts, in films that may have been good or may have
been bad but were always underbudgeted. For many years a high point of the Cannes Film
Festival was the annual luncheon given by Sam and Hilda Arkoff at the Hotel du Cap
d’Antibes. One year Arkoffpremiered his newfilm, Q, about a flying lizard that nests in
the Chrysler Building and swoops down on Wall Street to capture brokers to feed to its
hatchlings. At the luncheon Rex Reed told Arkoff: ", Sam 1 What a surprise! Right there in
the middle of all that dreck—a great Method performance by Michael Moriarty."Arkoff
beamed with pride. “The dreck was my idea, "he said.
from Fifing through Hollywood by the
Seat of My Pants
In the wake of Teenage Werewolf, we began looking for ways to capitalize on the
movie’s success. Soon Jim came up with another classic title: 1 Was a Teenage
Frankenstein.
Sam ArkoJJ
233
We both looked at each other and nodded our heads.
“I think that’s it,” I said.
It didn’t take us long to make decisions. By the end of the day, we had talked
to Herman Cohen. He was interested in the title, hired Aben Kandel (using the
pseudonym Kenneth Langtry) to write the screenplay, and Teenage Frankenstein
was on the fast track toward production.
That fast track, however, accelerated into a frantic pace after a meeting Jim
and I had with R. J. O’Donnell in Los Angeles just before Labor Day 1957.
O’Donnell was from the Southwest, where he was the head of Texas Interstate,
a large theater chain that was once part of the Paramount circuit before the con¬
sent decree. During our meeting, he was complaining about the studios.
“I spent all day yesterday arguing with them about percentages and grosses,”
O’Donnell said. “They want to squeeze every dollar out of us that they can. If
we agreed to their terms, we’d almost be losing money with every ticket we
sold.”
Texas Interstate had booked I Was a Teenage Werewolf, but not in its largest
and most prestigious theaters like the Majestic, its flagship house in Dallas. The
Majestic had always been a single-bill theater that stuck with studio blockbusters
like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Around the World in So Days; we had been rel¬
egated to the second tier of theaters, the so-called action houses.
During our conversation, Jim mentioned that 1 Was a Teenage Frankenstein was
on AIP’s drawing boards. And O’Donnell looked interested.
“When will it be ready?” he asked.
“The script will be done soon,” I told him. “The picture should be ready for
release in January.”
O’Donnell thought for a few seconds, then said, “Here’s what I have in mind.
If you can get me the picture—and a second feature—by Thanksgiving, I’ll put
them into the Majestic. The majors just assume that I’m going to play their big
Thanksgiving pictures without question. I want to show them that I don’t need
them as much as they think. Get me your pictures by Thanksgiving.”
Of course, O’Donnell had no intention of paying us the same rental fees as
the majors. The studios were getting 45 to percent of the grosses; he offered
us 35 percent. Even so, we jumped at the offer. It would have been a major coup
for us to be booked into the Majestic, particularly on a big holiday like Thanks¬
giving, which was one of the most lucrative moviegoing weekends of the year.
“Are you sure you can do it?” O’ Donnell asked. “Because if you can’t, I’ll book
what the majors give me.”
Jim and I looked at each other. “Yes,” I said. “We’ll have both movies ready
for you by Thanksgiving.” If we had had a rabbit’s-foot handy, we would have
been rubbing it furiously.
So between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, we set out to do the impossible.
234
The Business
As the script for 1 Was a Teenage Frankenstein was being finished, Herbert Strock
(whose credits included The Magnetic Monster and Gog for United Artists) was
hired to direct it. In October and November, the film was shot, edited, and
mixed. At the same time, we also were feverishly working on a second feature,
Blood of Dracula.
On Thanksgiving Day, the combination opened at the Majestic, much to the
chagrin of the majors. It also opened doors for us, changing the attitude of many
exhibitors, who finally recognized that AIP was making movies that could earn
money for theater-owners in their prestige houses. And we had a Teenage Franken¬
stein to thank for it.
Almost everywhere it played, Teenage Frankenstein did nearly as much busi¬
ness as Teenage Werewolf. Whit Bissell, who played the sinister psychologist in
Teenage Werewolf who catapults Michael Landon back into a “primitive state,” re¬
turned for an equally evil role in Teenage Frankenstein. Bissell, portraying the
grandson of the original Professor Frankenstein, is really a chip off the ol’ mad
scientist. A very demented forerunner to today’s transplant surgeons, Bissell’s
character creates a facially deformed teenage monster (played by Gary Conway),
using limbs and tissue from the cadavers of brawny teenagers who have, quite
conveniently, died in car and plane crashes. “He’s crying!” exclaims Bissell as
he examines his ghoulish creation. “Even the tear ducts work!”
The monster, however, doesn’t mingle well with people. He begins to ter¬
rorize the neighborhood, liquidating one innocent victim after another, finally
disposing of the ultimate authoritarian parent, Professor Frankenstein himself,
who will never again mutter, “I know what’s best for you!” Eventually, as the
police close in, the monster electrocutes himself as he stumbles into a control
panel.
What would Mary Shelley have thought!? Who knows? But many of the re¬
views were kind. James Powers of The Flollywood Reporter said the movie was “in¬
telligently and imaginatively done.” Even so, some squeamish critics recoiled at
the on-screen suggestions of body parts being prepared for grafting, with the
sound of a buzz saw screeching in the background. Certain people just can’t take
a joke!
In creating the picture’s advertising, we threw caution to the wind. The
posters for Teenage Frankenstein read, “Body of a Boy! Mind of a Monster! Soul
of an Unearthly Thing!” The artwork promised “the most gruesome horror ever
shown! . . . Not for the squeamish! . . . Free first aid and smelling salts! . . .
Don’t come before dinner!”
We didn’t leave a single cliche untouched.
I Was a Teenage Frankenstein rang the cash registers so often that we just
couldn’t give up on the teenage and horror themes. Herman Cohen and Her¬
bert Strock teamed up again for Flow to Make a Monster —a horror film that was
Sam A t k o JJ
*15
supposedly an insider’s look at how monster movies are created, complete with
reappearances by the teenage Frankenstein and werewolf. In How to Make a
Monster, however, they ungratefully kill the movie studio executives (I presume
that meant us!) who have nurtured their rebirth.
Meanwhile, Roger Corman was harder to sell on the value of teenage themes—
and of titles that grabbed audiences and wouldn’t let them go. He once ap¬
proached us with a title that wouldn’t end— The Saga of the Viking Women and
Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. Jim and I found it unacceptable.
“Roger,” I complained, “no one’s ever going to be able to remember that title.
Even if they did, they’d be out of breath after saying it just once!”
“But Sam,” he countered, “it says exactly what I want it to.”
“It would keep the marquees working overtime. Forget it!”
We finally agreed upon Viking Women and the Sea Serpent —but we should have
also kept a closer watch on how the picture was doing in production. Roger had
been approached by a team of special effects “experts” who made promises they
couldn’t keep. “We can create this great scene in which the monster rises from
the sea to intimidate the Viking women in their ship,” one of them told Roger.
“We’ve got all the techniques to pull it off.”
Roger could barely contain his enthusiasm. The scene looked great in the
artist’s rendition—but it lost something by the time it became the finished
product. During the actual shooting, the model of the boat was positioned
in front of a rear-projection screen, onto which Roger and his special-effects col¬
leagues projected the image of the serpent emerging from the ocean. Unfortu¬
nately, they could never synchronize the elements quite right—and in the
finished shot, the boat appears to be riding above the water! I was always proud
of AIP’s innovations, but even I couldn’t justify defying the laws of gravity!
Roger realized he had gotten in over his head. “I’m still trying to pull the scene
together,” he said, as he reshot it again and again. “But this is not my area of ex¬
pertise.” He finally ended up lighting the scene very dimly to try to minimize
its obvious shortcomings. If he really wanted to minimize them, I had a better
idea—leave the film on the cutting-room floor!
After that picture, we began looking for a project for Roger whose title
would take advantage of the word “teenage.” Eventually, we settled on Teenage
Caveman, although it was a choice with which Roger wasn’t completely happy.
He wanted to call the new picture Prehistoric World, which I abhorred.
“Roger,” I argued, “there’s nothing new or novel about it. Dozens of muse¬
ums have exhibits called ‘prehistoric world.’ Also, take a look at the plot. Don’t
forget that near the end of the movie, the audience realizes that they’re not
watching a story about prehistoric men at all; it’s about survivors of a modern-
236 The Business
day atomic holocaust! A title like Prehistoric World is just going to confuse them.
Besides, I’d like to get the word ‘teenage’ into the title, too.” Roger was still a
late convert to fully understanding the teenage market.
Teenage Caveman’s story line depicts a different style of youthful rebellion, in
which Robert Vaughn stars as a young caveman challenging the rules of his
primitive clan, venturing out past the familiar, barren confines into the world
beyond, exploring the postapocalyptic earth and looking for lusher pastures.
There, moviegoers see evidence of the nuclear blast—in particular, a beast
whose human ancestors were mutated into monsters by the bomb, and who car¬
ries a rather unlikely piece of evidence of the prenuclear era—a postcard from
New York City.
Vaughn, then a twenty-five-year-old struggling actor, was still six years away
from the TV hit The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and he was delighted to get the star¬
ring role in Teenage Caveman. And he got used to the AIP way of making movies
very quickly. At one point in the script, he was supposed to shoot a deer. And
that presented some problems. First of all, we didn’t have a deer. Even if we
could find one, it was no longer deer season, particularly in the heart of Los An¬
geles. Also, the movie was so low-budget ($70,000) that we may not have even
been able to afford a single bullet!
Nevertheless, Roger Corman wasn’t easily deterred. He sent one of his as¬
sistants to either the Elks or the Moose Club, where he unofficially “borrowed”
a stuffed deer. And that’s what Robert Vaughn took aim at and “killed.” In the
movie, he beams with the pride of a big-game hunter as he parades the stuffed
deer before the cameras. The picture would have played very well at a taxider¬
mists’ convention.
Roger, who often insisted that his movies contained subtle, social messages,
must have loved the critical reaction to Teenage Caveman. For example, the re¬
viewer for Variety called it “a plea for international cooperation in terms of the
dangers of atomic radiation.’’That was music to Roger’s socially conscious ears.
“Despite its ten-cent title, Teenage Caveman is a surprisingly good picture,”
the critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote.
William Castle
237
William Castle
John Waters, who wrote the introduction to William Castle’s memoir, does a lecture in
which he describes and even demonstrates some of Castle’s exploitation techniques: insur¬
ance policies in case audience members die of fright; electric shocking devices built into
seats; r funds for those who can’t "take it”; ghosts fy mg over the heads of the audience.
Waters’s own use of a scratch-’n’-sniff card with his movie Polyester was in the same
cheefully sleazy tradition. Castle (1914—19JJ), who late in his career astonished even
himself by gaining respectability as the producer of Rosemary’s Baby, was the king of
the B movies, and these days, when horror and science fiction movies cost untold millions
and are made and viewed with complete seriousness, his sideshow spirit would be a breath
of sanity. Castle is the inspiration for John Goodman’s sleaze merchant in Matinee
0993 )-
from Step Right Up
“Emergo”
“Bill, can’t you come up with another gimmick as good as the insurance policy
on Macabre ?” We were seated in Steve Broidy’s office at Allied Artists. Johnny
Flynn, the publicity director, was sitting next to me. “How about some sort of
sound effects? Like the wailing of ghosts that we can play in the lobby,” Johnny
suggested.
“It’s a good idea,” I said, “but we need something to really get the audiences
excited.”
“How about dressing the ushers as ghosts?” Steve asked.
“Fellas, what is the most exciting scene in the picture? When the skeleton
comes out of the vat—right?” Johnny and Steve were in agreement. I contin-
2 3 8
The Business
lied. “Suppose—after coming out of the vat—we had the skeleton walk off the
screen and go into the audience.”
“That’s impossible!” Broidy said.
Johnny Flynn smiled. “You’re dreaming, Bill.”
I paused. My mind was racing with an idea. “We build a separate black box
and install it next to the screen. The audience won’t be able to see it because
it’ll blend in with the black surrounding the screen. We build a plastic, twelve-
foot skeleton and put it on a wire running over the audience’s heads up to the
projection booth. At the point where Vincent Price manipulates the skeleton
on the screen, the projectionist pushes a button. The black box at the side
opens, the skeleton lights up and moves on the wire, traveling electrically over
the audience and up into the balcony. We time it exactly to the movement of
the skeleton on the screen, and Price, with his contraption of wires, seems to
pull the real skeleton from the balcony back into the screen.”
“You’re absolutely crazy!” screamed Broidy. Johnny Flynn laughed.
“It’ll work,” I said. “I’m sure.”
“We’ll have to manufacture hundreds of twelve-foot skeletons and to install
them in the theatre will cost a fortune!” Broidy moaned.
“The theatres will pay for them. . . .I’ve even got a name for my gimmick,”
I said. “EMERGO!”
San Francisco was our first play date. The Golden Gate Theatre. Johnny Flynn
and I had flown up. The theatre was packed, and Johnny and I stood in the back
to watch the unveiling of “Emergo.”
“Does the projectionist know when to push the button?” I asked Johnny ner¬
vously.
“I’ve told him three times.”
“Maybe I’d better go up and tell him again.”
“Relax . . . it’ll work.”
The image of Vincent Price flashed on the screen. He was manipulating his
wire contraption and pulling his skeleton out of the vat. The skeleton onscreen
was slowly walking toward the audience. Holding my breath, my gaze was riv¬
eted on the black box on the side of the screen. Now— now. Nothing happened.
“Oh, my God—it’s not working!” My face was tense. Another few seconds
passed—still nothing. “Johnny, for chrissake . . . what happened? I’ll kill that
projectionist! . . . Where’s the goddamn skeleton?”
After what seemed like an eternity, the box opened slowly. Looking consti¬
pated, the skeleton staggered out, dangled for a few seconds, then bounced back
into the box.
“Johnny, the sonofabitch skeleton is supposed to come out —not go back
in—and the fucking thing doesn’t light up.”
William Castle
2 39
The audience was howling. Suddenly the box opened again. The skeleton
popped out and went halfway up the wire. Something snapped and it fell into
the audience. The kids rose from their seats, grabbed the skeleton and, holler¬
ing, bounced it up into the air. The theatre was a madhouse!
We finally got “Emergo” working for the third show, and by evening, my
skeleton was performing beautifully. The audience loved it.
Saturday I was home in Beverly Hills. Ellen was expecting our second baby
any minute. The telephone rang. “It’s for you, darling, San Francisco calling.”
Picking up the phone, I waited for trouble. Larry Blanchard, the publicity di¬
rector for the Golden Gate Theatre, informed me audiences were going wild
and that I should get up there immediately.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. The Golden Gate Theatre was sold out for the
entire day. Thousands of kids had been waiting on line for hours for the evening
performances. That night the line was six blocks long! Rushing to a telephone
booth, I called Steve Broidy at his home. “Steve, we’re completely sold out!
We’ve done the biggest gross in the theatre’s history!”
“The Tingler”
“What’s a ‘Tingler’ look like?”
“Sort of like a lobster, but flat, and instead of claws it has long, slimy feelers.
That’s what I think a ‘Tingler’ looks like.” I was in the art department at Co¬
lumbia, talking to an artist. After the success of The House on Haunted Hill, I was
back at Columbia. Only this time, I had my own independent production com¬
pany and I was completely autonomous.
The artist finished sketching. “How’s that?” he said.
“Perfect,” I said. “People won’t be eating lobster for the next five years.”
“Vinnie, you’ve got to play the doctor in it. You’ll be perfect!”
“Bill, I don’t want to be typecast.” Vincent Price puffed on his long, slender
cigar.
“Vinnie, with the success of Haunted Hill, I think it’ll open up a whole new
career for you.”
Price hesitated. “Well . . . maybe. Tell me a little more about it.”
“The character you play has a theory that the ‘Tingler’ isin everyone’s spine.
Usually, people who are frightened scream, and screaming keeps their ‘Tingler’
from growing. Judith Evelyn will play the part of a deaf-mute who runs a silent
movie theatre. Experimenting, you scare the hell out of her. Because she can’t
utterasound—is unable to scream—her ‘Tingler’ grows, crushing hertodeath.
You operate, remove the ‘Tingler’ from her spine, and keep it in a glass jar in
2 4 °
The Business
your laboratory. Then it escapes and gets into the silent movie theatre. We’ll
then make believe that the theatre is where the picture is actually playing. The
‘Tingler’ will attack the projectionist and then get onto the screen. It’ll be a
movie within a movie. Audiences seeing it will think it’s loose in the theatre
they’re in. We’ll put your voice on the sound track and after the lights go out
. . . you announce that the ‘Tingler’ is loose in the audience and ask them to
scream for their lives. . . . All hell will break loose.”
“Do you think it’ll work?” Vinnie asked.
“I know it will.”
But it wasn’t enough. I was now becoming known as “The Master of Gim¬
micks.” Exhibitors were inquiring what my gimmick for The Tingler would be.
After the insurance policy and “Emergo,” they wanted something bigger—more
exciting.
One night the lamp beside my bed went out as I was reading. Getting a new
bulb from the kitchen, I started to replace it. “Shit!” I yelled. “I got a helluva
shock. Something’s wrong with the wire.” Suddenly I had my gimmick for The
Tingler. I shook Ellen excitedly. “Wake up, wake up!”
“What’s it now?” she mumbled.
“I’m going to buzz the asses of everyone in America by installing little mo¬
tors under the seats of every theatre in the country. When the ‘Tingler’ appears
on the screen, the projectionist will push a button. . . . The audiences will get
a shock on their butts—and think the ‘Tingler’ is loose in the theatre!”
By now Ellen was fully awake. “You’re stark raving mad!” she observed.
To get Columbia to go ahead with the idea was a herculean task. It meant the
outlay of a fortune to design the equipment and to make the little boxes. Teams
of special-effects men would have to be sent all over the country to install the
complicated equipment in the theatres at night after closing. A manual was
printed giving complete instructions with diagrams, etc.
My other gimmicks had proven so successful and paid off so handsomely at
the box office that Columbia went along with me. Teams of experts were dis¬
patched throughout the country to install the equipment. Dona Holloway, who
had been Harry Cohn’s executive secretary, was now my associate producer.
She came up with the name of the gimmick—“PERCEPTO.” Dona is a fantas¬
tic woman, and my production company couldn’t have made it without her help
and encouragement.
We were in Boston for the opening of The Tingler the following day. A snow¬
storm had delayed the special-effects crew, and when the theatre closed that
night, they hadn’t arrived. “Percepto” had to be installed.
Dona and I were under the theatre seats with our manuals. She was studying
the manual. “Where does the ‘B’ wire go?”
Lillian Ross
241
“How the hell do I know?” I snapped. “Look in the manual.”
“Oh, I see ... it fits into the relay that goes to the projection booth.”
“How many buzzers have you screwed underneath the seats?” I asked.
“About eight rows,” Dona replied.
“I’ve done six. We’ve got eighteen more to go—oh, and fasten them to the
seats tightly so the kids can’t get at them.”
All over the United States, when The Tingler got loose, people screamed for
their lives. In one theatre in Philadelphia, one patron, a burly truckdriver, got
so angry when the motor under his seat gave him a shock, that he ripped out the
entire seat in a rage, and threw it at the screen. Five ushers had to control him.
A week before The Tingler opened in Boston, The Nun’s Story, starring Audrey
Hepburn, was playing. During a matinee filled with women, the bored projec¬
tionist decided to test the “Tingler” equipment. He pushed the switch during a
scene where Hepburn and the nuns were praying. The proper Bostonian ladies
got the shock of their lives.
In the final count, I think we must have buzzed 20,000,000 behinds.
Lillian Ross
Lillian Ross’s Picture is a legendary work of reporting, a book-length 1952 study of one
motion picture, John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage, from itsfirst mention in a
gossip column through its disastrous previews and eventual failure. It is ironic that Hus¬
ton, who made so many successes (his next film was The African Queen), had his great¬
estfop so completely documented. Yet the book is all the more usfulfor showing how a
major studio handled a film that its top executive, L. B. Mayer, resistedfrom the start —
and how after the film pe formed poorly in previews, the studio desperately tried to change
its very nature in the editing room. This excerpt begins with thefirst in-house screenings
of the film. The major players here include Huston; Gotfried Reinhardt, the film’s pro¬
ducer; and Dore Schary, the head of production at MGM.
2 4 2
The Business
from Picture
“Well, boys,” Dore Schary said when he received us, “I’ve got bad news for you.
Hopper likes the picture.”
“Christ, kid!” Huston said. He and Reinhardt both laughed.
“You’re happy, huh?” Schary said.
“Christ!” said Huston.
“You’re leaving for Africa,” Schary said.
“Yeah,” Huston said.
“I’ll show you a couple of things when you get back,” Schary said.
“Christ, kid,” Huston said. “I’ve never had a reaction like this to a picture.
Willie Wyler says it’s the greatest picture he’s ever seen.”
“You had Willie there?” Schary said.
“Yeah, and—” Huston paused, as though his mind had gone blank. “Who else
was there, Gottfried?”
“You look sort of gay in that cap,” Schary said, not giving Reinhardt a chance
to answer.
“Well, I’m kind of a sport,” Huston said, taking off his cap and coat.
Schary ushered us into the living room. Huston said, “Dore, before you see
any of this, I just want to tell you it’s the best picture I ever made. I never, never
had such a reaction before.”
“Let’s run it and we’ll talk later,” said Schary.
“You want to close the blind?” Reinhardt asked. The sun was streaming in.
“Pull it down, Gottfried,” Schary said, and Reinhardt pulled down the blind.
The wide panel in the wall at one end of the room slid up, exposing the white
screen, and the M-G-M lion appeared on the screen, and its roar dissolved in
the sound of gunfire. The prologue of the picture started, showing the Youth
on sentry duty near a river. Two of Schary's children bounded into the room
and sat down facing the screen.
Schary got up and led them out of the room. “I told you to stay out. I want
you to stay out,” he said.
Nobody said anything during the showing, and except for some subdued
laughter from Huston and Reinhardt at an early comic scene in the movie there
was no sound in the room at all but what came from the sound track. At the end
of the picture, the lights came on. Schary turned slowly to Reinhardt and Hus¬
ton and said, “I think you ought to reprise these guys at the end.”
“The faces,” Huston said, nodding emphatically.
“Yeah,” said Schary. “By the way, I’m glad to see you dubbed in ‘gone goose’
for ‘gone coon.’ ” He was apparently taking his time about giving his opinion.
After another long pause, he said, “Well, it’s a wonderful picture.”
Lillian Ross 243
Huston leaped to his feet and went over to Schary. Reinhardt shakily held a
match to his cigar, which had gone out.
“I have two suggestions,” Schary said as the heads of his children peered
around the door. “I think some of the picture will be swallowed by the music.
If it were my picture, I would yank the music out of the scene where the boy
writes the letter. Close the door, kids!” The heads vanished. “Each time the music
has the sense of warmth and nostalgia, it creates a mood that is helpful to the
picture,” Schary went on. “As soon as the music gets highly inventive, it hurts
the picture. I think it’ll hurt your picture, John. This picture is gonna stand up
for years to come. It’s a great, great picture.”
Reinhardt and Huston did not interrupt. They were tense, and they were giv¬
ing Schary their full attention.
“A great picture,” Schary repeated. He glanced at some notes he had made.
“The only scene I don’t like—I still don’t understand it, it destroys the mood—
is the scene where the recruits are marchin’ past the veterans and the veterans
are laughin’ at the guys.” He had lapsed into an even more homespun and chatty
manner than usual. “That irony at the end, when the guys think they’re winnin’
a battle and then it turns out they’re not—that’s accurate and real. I don’t ac¬
cept it in the other scene. It confuses me. I have to reorient myself. I think that
scene should come out. I think it hurts you.”
Huston started walking in small circles. “Uh-huh,”he said. “Uh-huh. I’m just
trying to orient the thought, Dore.”
Reinhardt said nothing. He seemed to be making an effort to keep his face
blank.
After a while, Huston said haltingly, “The only value the scene has, it’s an in¬
terruption of that slam-bang of battle.”
“That’s not a valid argument,” Schary said. “The mood of battle is sustained.
You don’t have to break it.”
“You’re right,” Huston said. “It doesn’t need to be there.”
Schary looked pleased. “It just confuses you,”he said. “The scene always both¬
ered me.”
Huston said, “You think it’s an error, Dore, to take the view that the sole
purpose of the scene is to give you a lift?”
“You don’t need the scene,” said Schary. “Boys, I think this picture is a great
document. It’s gonna be in the files. It’s gonna be in the history books. It’s a
great picture.”
“Then it comes off,” Huston said.
“It must be sold as a great battle story,” Schary said. “If we make it too spe¬
cial, you know—a great novel and all that—we’ll drive away the kids who come
to see a war story.”
“The danger is it might be slapped into the big theatres for short runs,” Rein¬
hardt said.
The B usiness
244
“It won’t be,” said Schary.
“It ought to go to a big theatre that will give it time to build to a long run,”
said Reinhardt.
“You mean, Gottfried, like the Astor?” Huston asked.
“Yes. Show that the makers of the picture have faith in the picture,” Rein¬
hardt answered.
Huston said that reprising the faces at the end of the picture was a great idea.
“Just goes to prove the value of reading your mail,” Schary said warmly. “A
letter comes from a fella, he says, ‘I run a theatre. Why don’t you put the name
of the picture at the end? All it ever says at the end is “The End.” This is a great
idea and it costs you nothing.’ So I’m puttin’ in this new thing at the studio.”
Schary seemed to be in especially high spirits. “I think this is the best picture you
ever made, John.”
“So do I,” said Huston, laughing.
“So glad we made it,” Schary said, and chuckled.
“Yeah, we finally made it,” Huston said.
“It’s a great picture, and it’ll get great notices,” said Schary. “I told you what
your notices would be on “The Asphalt Jungle,’ didn’t I?”
“You did,” said Huston. There was a moment of silence.
“You fellas call me right after the preview,” said Schary.
“Jesus, I’d love to see this be a big success,” Huston said. “You know why,
Dore. After everything we’ve been through with L.B. on this picture.”
“Don’t worry about it, kiddy,” Schary said, grinning.
“Dore, you like the picture?” Reinhardt asked.
“I told you—this picture is gonna be remembered,” Schary said. “It’s a great
picture.”
“It ought to run in a theatre like the Astor or the Music Hall,” Reinhardt said.
“Not the Music Hall,” Schary said. “It should go into a house where people
will come to enjoy seeing it, not a place where it will be the object of concern
about whether it will gross this much or that much.”
“The thing is it’s got to have time to grow,” Huston said. “I’d go to towns
where ‘Asphalt’ had just opened and the managers would tell me business was
picking up, but they couldn’t take the chance of keeping it on for five more days.”
Schary said that this was the kind of picture that should have special show¬
ings, to special groups, who would promote it. Also, it should have a special,
and dignified, kind of publicity campaign. “Too bad you’re leaving,” he said to
Huston. “You could handle some special showings yourself.”
Huston said it was imperative that he be in England in four days, on his way
to Africa.
“I could send the picture to New York with you,” Schary said.
“I’ll be in New York only one day—Sunday,” Huston said.
Lillian Ross
2 4 S
“Too bad,” said Schary. “The press will go crazy about this picture. This is a
magnificent picture. It has intelligence and it has art. It fulfills the purpose of
the cinema as a medium of entertainment and education. Nothing is wrong ex¬
cept that one scene. And a few tiny places where you go out too quick or hold
too long.” His telephone rang. The call was from Benny Thau, one of the com¬
pany’s vice-presidents. “I feel pretty good, Benny,” Schary said. “No, I can’t be
at the preview. I don’t know whether you’ll like it or not, but you’re gonna see
one of the greatest pictures ever made.”
When Schary had hung up, Huston said, “Can he afford not to like it now?”
Schary chuckled.
“I saw L.B. today,” Reinhardt said slowly. “Mayer said to me, ‘Maybe the pic¬
ture is a good picture, but it can’t possibly be a success at the box office.’ 1 told
him, ‘I don’t know if it is commercial, but it is a great picture.’ ”
Schary said dryly, “You played that scene wrong, Gottfried. If / had been play¬
ing that scene, / would have said, ‘If I were starting all over again, I would now
enter upon the making of this picture with greater confidence than ever before,
with complete and unmitigated confidence.’ ”
“Too many people say that,” Reinhardt said in a low voice.
“L.B. thinks a picture’s no good if you don’t say it,” Huston said.
“I don’t agree with you on the music,” Reinhardt said suddenly to Schary.
Huston and Schary looked startled. Schary said, “I have no conviction. It’s
just my personal reaction.”
“Audie is twice as good with the music under him, I tell you,” said Reinhardt.
Schary replied coolly, “I think all music in pictures has to be cliche to be ef¬
fective. Let’s not debate it. I’ll prove it to you. In Marine pictures, you play ‘Halls
of Montezuma.’ In Navy pictures, you play ‘Anchors Aweigh.’ In this picture,
the music that’s effective is the sentimental-cliche music. It’s a fact. Let’s not
debate it.”
Schary quickly asked Huston whether he intended to sell his father’s coun¬
try house in the San Bernardino Mountains, and told him he’d be interested in
it if Huston ever set a price on it.
“So you’re going to have your Berchtesgaden,” said Reinhardt.
Schary did not seem to hear him. “I’m getting to the point where I want a
place of my own. A place," he said. “With things on it.” He stood up, and con¬
gratulated Huston and Reinhardt again. “Call me after the preview, kiddies,” he
said.
The preview was at the Pic wood Theatre, a fifteen-minute drive from Schary’s
house. M-G-M often previewed pictures there. It was a modem, comfortable
theatre, and on preview nights the lights on the marquee always read, “major
246
The Business
studio preview tonight.” The purpose of a preview—usually called a sneak pre¬
view—is supposedly to spring a picture on an audience without warning, in order
to get an uninfluenced reaction. Many previews are advertised on marquees, in
newspapers, and by word of mouth, but even these are known in the trade as
sneak previews, or sneaks.
The marquee of the Picwood said “harvey” as well as “major studio preview
TONIGHT.”
“1 hate previews,” Reinhardt said to me as he and Huston and I got out of the
car. “The smelly house. Popcorn. Babies crying. Ugh! I hate it.”
Bronislau Kaper buttonholed Reinhardt in the lobby. “Tell me. What did he
say? Tell me everything.” Reinhardt led him aside to tell him what Schary had
said.
Johnny Green, head of M-G-M’s music department, and Margaret Booth
came up to Huston and asked him what Schary had said.
“Who’s got a nickel?” Huston said. “Albert! Get me some popcorn.” Albert
Band, who was now working as Reinhardt’s assistant, made his way through the
crowd to a gleaming popcorn machine, as streamlined as the Picwood Theatre
itself.
A man asked Huston whether he had ever heard Tallulah Bankhead’s radio
show. “If I could find the right thing in the picture, I might get a spot for it on
Tallulah’s show,” he said.
One of the company’s vice-presidents, L. K. Sidney, came over to Huston,
took a handful of his popcorn, and said, “Good luck, John.”
A short man with a cherubic face came over to Huston and pumped his hand.
“Remember me? Swifty,” he said.
“How are you, Swifty?” said Huston.
“I know you’re thinking of other important matters tonight, but this I gotta
tell you,” said Swifty.
“Of course, Swifty,” Huston said, looking very interested.
“The latest about Jack Warner!” Swifty announced. “One of Jack’s produc¬
ers suggests he do a picture about Mexico. So Jack says, ‘I don’t like Mexican
pictures. All the actors in them look too goddamn Mexican.’ ” Swifty let out a
wild guffaw.
“A great story, Swifty,” Huston said.
“I knew you’d appreciate it,” said Swifty.
Huston tossed pieces of popcorn into his mouth. “Eddie Mannix!” he said,
moving to greet a square-faced, hulking man who looked like a football coach—
another of M-G-M’s vice-presidents.
“Good luck, fella,” said Mannix.
Mrs. Huston arrived breathlessly, having driven in from Malibu Beach with
Pablo.
Mrs. Reinhardt turned up and said that she had reluctantly left her French
Lillian Ross
2 47
poodle, Mocha, at home. “Gottfried!” she cried. “Mocha wanted to come to the
preview.”
“Silvia, please!” Reinhardt said.
“What’s wrong with Mocha’s opinion?” Mrs. Reinhardt asked.
“L. B. Mayer is here,” someone said to Huston. “He just scooted inside.”
“How are you? Glad to see you,” Huston was saying, shaking hands with still
another M-G-M vice-president, as Reinhardt took a stand at Huston’s side.
I went in and sat down in the rear. When “The Red Badge of Courage”
flashed on the screen, there was a gasp from the audience and a scattering of ap¬
plause. As the showing went along, some of the preview-goers laughed at the
right times, and some laughed at the wrong times, and some did not laugh at
all. When John Dierkes, in the part of the Tall Soldier, and Royal Dano, in the
part of the Tattered Man, played their death scenes, which had been much ad¬
mired before, some people laughed and some murmured in horror. The audi¬
ence at the private showing had been deeply and unanimously moved by the death
scenes. There was no unanimity in the audience now. Several elderly ladies
walked out. Now and then, there were irrelevant calls from the balcony; one
masculine voice, obviously in the process of changing, called out, “Hooray for
Red Skelton!” Two or three babies cried. Men posted at the exits counted all
departures. I could not see where Huston and Reinhardt were sitting. Across
the aisle from me I could see L. B. Mayer, white-haired and bespectacled, sit¬
ting with his arms folded, looking fiercely blank-faced. Several M-G-M people
nearby were watching him instead of the movie. During a particularly violent
battle scene, Mayer turned to a lady sitting on his right and said, “That’s Hus¬
ton for you.” There was a slight stir in his vicinity, but Mayer said nothing more.
In the lobby, the Picwood manager, assisted by several M-G-M men, stood
ready to hand out what are known as preview cards—questionnaires for the au¬
dience to fill out. The first question was: “How would you rate this picture?”
Five alternatives were offered: “Outstanding,” “Excellent,” “Very Good,”
“Good,” and “Fair.” Other questions were: “Whom did you like best in the pic¬
ture?” “Which scenes did you like most?” “Which scenes, if any, did you dislike?”
“Would you recommend this picture to your friends?” Below the questions, there
was this additional request:
We don’t need to know your name, but we would like to know the following
facts about you:
(A) Male
Female
(B) Please check your age group:
Between i 2 and 17
Between 1 8 and 30
Between 31 and 43
Over 43
248
The Business
When the showing ended, the preview-goers milled about in the lobby, fill¬
ing out the cards under the resentful surveillance of the men who had made the
movie. Mayer walked out of the theatre and stood at the curb out front, look¬
ing as though he would like to have somebody talk to him. Reinhardt and Hus¬
ton went into the manager’s office, off the lobby, and sat down to await the
verdict. Johnny Green, Margaret Booth, Bronislau Kaper, and Albert Band al¬
ternately watched the people filling out cards and Mayer. Most of the other ex¬
ecutives had already departed. Benny Thau joined Mayer at the curb. Mayer got
into his town-and-country Chrysler, and his chauffeur drove him off. Benny Thau
got into a black limousine, and his chauffeur drove him off. Band went into the
manager’s office. Huston and Reinhardt sat looking glumly at each other.
“Did Mayer talk to anybody?” Reinhardt asked.
Band reported that Mayer had talked to Benny Thau.
The manager came in and handed Reinhardt and Huston a batch of preview
cards he had collected from the audience. Reinhardt read through them rapidly.
Huston read some of the comments aloud. “ ‘This would be a wonderful pic¬
ture on television,’ ” he read. “ ‘With all the money in Hollywood, why can’t
you make some good pictures?’ ”
“ ‘Fair.’ ‘Fair.’ ‘Good.’ ‘Fair,’ ’’Bandread. “Here’s one with ‘Fair’ crossed
out and ‘Stinks’ substituted.”
“Here’s an ‘Excellent,’ ” Huston said.
“No ‘ Outstanding’s yet,” said Reinhardt. He was perspiring, and he looked
grim. “Here’s a ‘Lousy,’ ” he said.
“The audience hated the picture,” Band said.
Huston seemed dazed. “Call Dore, Gottfried,” he said.
Reinhardt dialled the number. After getting Schary, he said, “Dore,” in a low,
shaking voice, and after listening for a moment he said, “You know? . . . Who
told you? . . . Well, then you know. . . . Well, a lot of people walked out. . . .
Well, a new batch of cards is coming in. . . . We’ve counted twenty-two ‘Out¬
standing’s so far, fourteen ‘Excellent’s, thirty ‘Very Good’s, fourteen ‘Good’s,
and forty-three ‘Fair’s. . . . Well, Margaret Booth said the reaction was terri¬
ble. . . . No, I didn’t talk to L.B. I didn’t talk to Mannix. . . . Well, I think we
should take it out again tomorrow, with a serious picture. Not with ‘Harvey.’
Maybe with ‘The Steel Helmet.’ ... He is right here.”
Reinhardt handed the telephone to Huston, who said, “Well. . . . Well,
Jesus Christ. Dore, I had the feeling they’d rather be anywhere than in this the¬
atre. Must have been a dozen people walked out on the scenes I think are the
best—the two death scenes. Wait till you see the cards. They’re extraordinary.
They’re either raves or they say it’s the worst picture they’ve ever seen. They
just hate it. It’s extraordinary.”
An M-G-M man put his head in at the door. “Thirty-two walkouts,” he said.
Elmore Leonard
249
The capacity of the Picwood was sixteen hundred, and it had been filled at the
start of the showing.
The manager said sympathetically to Reinhardt, “How much did it cost? A
million five?”
After Huston hung up, he said to Reinhardt, “Christ, Gottfried! I never saw
one like this before, did you?”
“You can’t force an audience to like a picture,” Reinhardt said bleakly. “God!
Tomorrow morning at the studio! How I hate to walk in there! They’ll all be
my enemies.”
“Well, good night, Gottfried,” Huston said. He was driving home with Mrs.
Huston and Pablo.
Reinhardt walked to his car with his wife and me. “It’s a cruel business,” he
said. “It isn’t worth it. Almost a whole year.” He looked at his half-smoked cigar
with distaste. “M-G-M doesn’t know what to do with a picture like this.” He
put the cigar in his mouth. “Did you see John? John was demolished tonight.”
Elmore Leonard
The Shorty in the title of Leonard’s novel is Michael Weir, a short but popular movie star.
Chili Palmer, the hero of the book, is a Miami loan shark who finds himself in an un¬
likely association with a third-rate Hollywood producer who needs Shorty for a movie.
Leonard’s dialogue hereflows with such irresistible comic logic that it was employed with
minimal changes in the 1995 movie, in which John Travolta is Chili, Danny DeVito is
Shorty, and Gene Hackman is the producer.
from Get Shorty
It took Chili a couple of minutes to figure Michael Weir out. He wanted peo¬
ple to think he was a regular guy, but was too used to being who he was to pull
it off.
2jo The Business
The two of them sitting at the table now, Chili asked him i f he wanted a drink.
Michael, watching Nicki and her band through the archway, said yeah, that
sounded like a good idea. Chili asked him what he wanted. Michael said oh, any¬
thing. Did he want Scotch, bourbon, a beer? Michael said oh, and stopped and
said no, he’d like a Perrier. Still watching Nicki and the band. They hadn’t started
to play. Chili looked over at the bar, not open yet, thinking he’d have to go all
the way upstairs to get the movie star his soda water. Right then Michael said,
“They’re a tough audience.”
Chili noticed the movie star’s expression, eyebrows raised, like he’d just heard
some bad news but was more surprised than hurt.
“My Michael Jackson went right by them.”
Oh—meaning his moonwalk routine. Chili said, “It looked good to me.” It
did.
“T o do it right you put on a touch of eye makeup, white socks, the glove . . .
I was a little off on the voice too, the baby-doll whisper?”
Chili said, “I couldn’t hear that part.”
“But I can understand it, guys like that, their attitude. It has to do with ter¬
ritorial imperative.”
Chili said, “That must be it,” feeling more at ease with the movie star, know¬
ing a bullshitter when he met one. It didn’t mean the guy wasn’t good.
“I’m not certain why,” Michael said, “but it reminds me of the one, the third-
rate actor doing Hamlet?” Michael smiling with his eyes now. “He’s so bad that
before long the audience becomes vocally abusive, yelling at him to get off the
stage. They keep it up until the actor, finally, unable to take any more, stops
the soliloquy and says to the audience, ‘Hey, what’re you blaming me for? I didn’t
write this shit. ’ ”
Now they were both smiling, Michael still doing his with his eyes, saying, “I
could tell those kids I didn’t invent Michael Jackson . . . someone else did.” Chili
wondering, if it doesn’t bother him, why didn’t he just drop it? Chili looking
for the right moment to bring up Mr. Lovejoy.
He was ready to get into it, said, “Oh, by the way . . .” and Nicki’s band
kicked off, filling the room with their sound, and Michael turned his chair to
face the bandstand through the archway. They were loud at first, but then set¬
tled down and it wasn’t too bad, more like rhythm and blues than rock and roll.
The beat got the tips of Chili’s fingers brushing the table. Michael sat with his
hands folded in his lap, his legs in the baggy pants stretched out in front of him,
ankles crossed, the laces of one of his Reeboks loose, coming untied. He looked
more like in his thirties than forty-seven. Not a bad-looking guy, even with the
nose, Chili studying his profile. There was no way to tell if Michael liked the
beat or not. Chili thought of asking him, but had the feeling people waited for
the movie star to speak first, give his opinion and then everybody would say yeah,
Elmore Leonard
that’s right, always agreeing. Like with Momo, the few times Chili saw him in
the social club years ago, noticing the way the guys hung on to whatever Momo
said. It was like you had to put kneepads on to talk to this man who never worked
in his life.
Chili leaned into the table saying, “You might not remember, but we met
one time before.”
He gave the movie star time to look over.
“In Brooklyn, when you were making The Cyclone, that movie.”
Michael said, “You know, I had a feeling we’d met. I couldn’t quite put my
finger on it, the occasion. Chil, is it?”
“Chili Palmer. We met, it was at a club on 86 th Street, Bensonhurst. You
dropped by, you wanted to talk to some of the guys.”
“Sure, I remember it very well,” Michael said, turning his chair around to the
table.
“You were, I guess you were seeing what it was like to be one of us,” Chili
said, locking his eyes on the movie star’s the way he looked at a slow pay, a guy
a week or two behind.
“Yeah, to listen more than anything else.”
“Is that right?”
“Pick up your rhythms of speech.”
“We talk different?”
“Well, different in that the way you speak is based on an attitude,” the movie
star said, leaning in with an elbow on the table and running his hand through his
hair. Chili could see him doing it on the screen, acting natural. “It’s like ya tone
a voice,” the movie star said, putting on an accent, “says weah ya cornin’ from.”
Then back to his normal voice, that had a touch of New York in it anyway, say¬
ing, “I don’t mean where you’re from geographically, I’m referring to attitude.
Your tone, your speech patterns demonstrate a certain confidence in your¬
selves, in your opinions, your indifference to conventional views.”
“Like we don’t give a shit.”
“More than that. It’s a laid-back attitude, but with an intimidating edge. Cut-
and-dried, no bullshit. Your way is the only way it’s going to be.”
“Well, you had it down cold,” Chili said. “Watching you in the movie, if I
didn’t know better I’d have to believe you were a made guy and not acting. I
mean you became that fuckin guy. Even the fink part,” Chili said, laying it on
now. “I never met a fink and I hope to God I never do, but how you did it must
be the way finks act.”
The movie star liked that, starting to nod, saying, “It was a beautiful part. All
I had to do was find the character’s center, the stem I’d use to wind him up and
he’d play, man, he’d play.” The movie star nodding with Nicki’s beat now, eyes
half closed, like he was showing how to change into somebody else, saying,
The Business
*5*
“Once I have the authentic sounds of speech, the rhythms, man, the patois, I can
actually begin to think the way those guys do, get inside their heads.”
Like telling how he studied this tribe of natives in the jungles of Brooklyn.
That’s how it sounded to Chili.
He said, “Okay, I’m one of those guys you mention. What am I thinking?”
The movie star put on an innocent look first, surprised. What? Did I say some¬
thing? The look gradually becoming a nice-guy smile. He ran both hands through
his hair this time.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying an actual metamorphosis takes place,
I become one of you. That wouldn’t be acting. I had the opportunity one time,
years ago, to ask Dame Edith Evans how she approached her parts and she said,
‘I pretend, dear boy, I pretend.’ Well, I’ll get involved in a certain life, observe
all I can, because I want that feeling of realism, verisimilitude. But ultimately
what I do is practice my craft, I act, I pretend to be someone else.”
“So you don’t know what I’m thinking,” Chili said, staying with it.
It got another smile, a tired one. “No, I don’t. Though I have to say, I’m cu¬
rious.”
“So, you want to know?”
“If you’d like to tell me, yeah.”
“I’m thinking about a movie.”
“One of mine?”
“One we’re producing and we want you to be in,” Chili said, seeing the movie
star’s eyebrows go up, and one of the arms in the wom-out leather jacket, rais¬
ing his hand as Chili tried to tell him, “It’s one you already know about, you read.”
But Michael wasn’t listening, he was saying, “Wait. Time out, okay?” before
lowering his arm and settling back. “I don’t want to come off sounding rude,
because I appreciate your interest and I’m flattered, really, that you’d think of
me for a part. But, and here’s the problem. My agent won’t let me go anywhere
near an independently financed production, I’m sorry.”
Chili got to say, “It isn’t that kind—” and the hand shot up again.
“My manager along with my agent, the business heads, they’ve made it our
policy. Otherwise, I’m sure you can understand, I’d have pitches coming at me
from independents day and night.” The movie star shrugged, helpless, his gaze
moving off to the band.
“You think I’m talking about wiseguy money,” Chili said. “No way. This one’s
gonna be made at a studio.”
It brought the movie star partway back.
“I’m not connected to those people anymore. Not since I walked out of a loan-
shark operation in Miami.”
That brought the movie star all the way back with questions in his eyes, sit¬
ting up, interested in the real stuff.
Elmore Leonard
2J3
“What happened? The pressure got to you?”
“Pressure? I’m the one applied the pressure.”
“That’s what I mean, the effect that must’ve had on you. What you had to do
sometimes to collect.”
“Like have some asshole’s legs broken?”
“That, yeah, or some form of intimidation?”
“Whatever it takes,” Chili said. “You’re an actor, you like to pretend. Imag¬
ine you’re the shylock. A guy owes you fifteen grand and he skips, leaves
town.”
“Yeah?”
“What do you do?”
Chili watched the movie star hunch over, narrowing his shoulders. For a few
moments he held his hands together in front of him, getting a shifty look in his
eyes. Then gave it up, shaking his head.
“I’m doing Shylock instead of a shylock. Okay, what’s my motivation? The
acquisition of money. To collect. Inflict pain if I have to.” Michael half-closed
his eyes. “My father used to beat me for no reason . . . Take the money I earned
on my paper route, that I kept in a cigar box . . .”
“Hold it,” Chili said. “I was a shylock—what do I look like?”
“That’s right, yeah,” Michael said, staring at Chili, his expression gradually
becoming deadpan, sleepy.
“You the shylock now?”
“Guy owes me fifteen large and takes off, I go after him,” the movie star said.
“The fuck you think I do?”
“Try it again,” Chili said. “Look at me.”
“I’m looking at you.”
“No, I want you to look at me the way I’m looking at you. Put it in your eyes,
‘You’re mine, asshole,’ without saying it.”
“Like this?”
“What’re you telling me, you’re tired? You wanta go to bed?”
“Wait. How about this?”
“You’re squinting, like you’re trying to look mean or you need glasses. Look
at me. I’m thinking, You’re mine, I fuckin own you. What I’m not doing is feel¬
ing anything about it one way or the other. You understand? You’re not a per¬
son to me, you’re a name in my collection book, a guy owes me money, that’s
all.”
“The idea then,” the movie star said, “I show complete indifference, until I’m
crossed.”
“Not even then. It’s nothing personal, it’s business. The guy misses, he knows
what’s gonna happen.”
“How about this?” the movie star said, giving Chili a nice dead-eyed look.
2 S 4
The Business
“That’s not bad.”
“This’s what I think of you, asshole. Nothing.”
“I believe it,” Chili said.
“I turn it on when I confront the guy.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t found him yet.”
Chili watched the movie star wondering what he was supposed to do next,
giving him a strange look, Chili wondering himself exactly what he was doing,
except he could see it right there in his mind so he kept going.
“The guy took off for Las Vegas.”
“How do I know that?” The movie star picking up on it.
“The guy’s wife tells you.”
Chili paused, the movie star waiting.
“Yeah?”
“The wife wants to go with you on account of her husband skipped with all
her money . . . three hundred grand,” Chili said, starting to roll and not seeing
anywhere to stop, “they conned off an airline after this jet crashed the guy was
supposed to be on but wasn’t and everybody was killed.”
The movie star was looking at him funny again.
“If the guy wasn’t on the plane ...”
“He was, but he got off just before it left and blew up. So his bag’s on the
plane, his name’s on the passenger list...”
“The wife sues the airline,” the movie star said, nodding. “This is a gutsy babe.”
“Good-looking too.”
“The husband takes off with the money, plus he still owes me the fifteen large,”
Michael the shylock said, “and the wife and I take off after him. Go on. When
do I meet up with the guy and give him the look?”
Chili had to think about it. Tell Michael what actually happened or what he
thought would sound better?
“It’s not that simple,” Chili said. “You have to be careful. Leo, the husband,
isn’t much to worry about, outside of he could try and nail you from behind if
you get close. But there’s another guy that comes along, a hard-on you happen
to owe money to. A mob guy. He knows about the three hundred grand and
would like to take you out anyway, on account of a past situation.”
This time when Chili paused, wondering how to get back to where this thing
had started, the movie star said, “This actually happened, didn’t it? It’s a true
story.”
“Basically,” Chili said.
“You’re the shylock.”
“I was at one time.”
“So, did you find the guy? What’s his name, Leo?”
“I found him,” Chili said, “yeah.”
Elmore Leonard
2S5
That was a fact. But now he didn’t know what else to say, or how he actu¬
ally got this far into it.
“You understand, you’re pretending you’re a shylock.”
“Yeah? Go on.”
“I mean that’s all we’re doing. Y ou wanted to see if you can think like a shy-
lock, get in his head. So I gave you a situation, that’s all.”
“You’re not going to tell me the rest?”
“At this point, basically, that has to be it.”
Michael was giving him a strange look again: not so confused this time, more
like he was figuring something out. He said, “Well, if you won’t, you won’t,”
and started to grin. “I don’t know how long you’ve been in the business, but
that was the most ingenious pitch I ’ ve ever had thrown at me, and I mean in my
entire career. You got me playing the guy, the shylock, before I even realized
it was a pitch. So now I have to read the script to find out what happens. Beau¬
tiful. Really, that was artfully done.”
Chili said, “Well, actually . . .” The movie star had his head turned and was
watching Nicki and her group wailing away. “Actually, what 1 started to men¬
tion, the movie we want you to be in is Mr. Lovejoy. We understand you read
the script and like it ... a lot.”
Now he had to wait for this to make sense, give the movie star time to think
about it. Michael said, “Lovejoy /’looking over again. “That’s the one, the florist
sees his boy run over?”
“And goes after the guy, to catch him driving his car.”
“What production company was that?”
“ZigZag, Harry Zimm.”
“That’s right, the slime-people guy. I read for Harry when I first started work¬
ing in features. I didn’t get the part.”
Chili said, “He turned you down? Come on.”
“I wasn’t Michael Weir then,” Michael said.
He wasn’t kidding either. It sounded strange.
“Anyway, we’re going to Tower Studios with it,” Chili said, and that got a
smile from Michael.
He said, “You know what they say about Elaine Levin. She fucked her
Rolodex to get where she is. But I’ll tell you something, she didn’t have to if
she did. Elaine knows what she’s doing. She made an awful lot of money for
Metro up to the time they forced that disaster on her. Did you see it, San Juan
Hill?”
“I liked it,” Chili said.
“It wasn’t a bad picture,” Michael said. “It had the facts right for once, the
black troops saving Teddy Roosevelt’s ass, but that didn’t sell tickets and it was
way overproduced. The picture cost more than the actual war, which hadn’t been
2J6
The Business
done to my knowledge since A Message to Garcia with John Boles. I remember a
script called Siboney, the same war, I thought very seriously about doing. That
was a fascinating period, the U.S. emerging as a world power, the enactment
of the Monroe Doctrine, eminent domain ... I might look at that script again,
Siboney. That was where our troops landed in Cuba.”
“Sounds good,” Chili said, not having any idea what the guy was talking
about. He tried to get back to Lovejoy with, “Listen, what we’re thinking—”
But Michael was already saying, “The title does have a nice sound. Build the
score around the song. Si-bo-ney, da da da da . . .”
Christ, now he was singing it, against the rock beat in the background.
“Da da da da, Si-bo-ney . . . It’s an old piece but has all kinds of dramatic riffs
in it. It can be stirring, romantic, militaristic. Someone like John Williams could
score the ass off that picture.”
Chili said, “What I wanted to mention ...” and paused. The room was quiet
again, the band finished with their number. “We’re definitely gonna produce
the movie at a studio.”
Michael Weir nodded. But now he was getting up, looking over at Nicki rais¬
ing her guitar strap over her head. He said, “I guess we’re taking off. It was nice
talking to you.”
“You have to go, huh?”
“Nicki’s waiting. We’re going to duck out. . .”
“But you like LovejoyT’
“I like the character, the guy, he has possibilities. But the way the plot de¬
velops it turns into a B movie by the time you’re into the second act. Take a
look at The Cyclone again, the way a visual fabric is maintained even while the
metaphor plays on different levels, with the priest, with the mother ... so that
you never lose sight of the picture’s thematic intent.”
Chili said, “Yeah, well, we’re already making changes. Getting a girl in it,
fixing up the ending ...”
“Sounds good.”
“Can we talk about it, you get a chance?”
“Anytime,” Michael Weir said, moving away. “Call Buddy and we’ll set
something up.”
“Buddy?”
“My agent,” the movie star said. “Harry knows him.”
Chili opened the door to 3 2 j to see the message light on the phone blinking on
and off. He lit a cigarette before dialing the operator.
She said, “Just a minute.” The one with maybe a Latin accent. She came back
on saying, “A Mr. Zimm called. You have a meeting tomorrow, three p.m. at
Michael To1 kin
2J7
Tower Studios. He’ll call you in the morning. Let’s see. And a Mr. Carlo called.
He said he was going out for the evening and to tell you . . . Mr. Barboni will
arrive tomorrow on Delta Flight Eighty-nine at twelve-oh-five. You like me to
repeat that?”
Chili told her thanks anyway.
Michael Tolkin
Michael Tolkin’s novel, made into one of the great Hollywood movies by Robert Altman,
was an insider’s book about an outsider. Its hero, a mid-level executive named Griffin,
has committed murder shortly before this excerpt begins, killing a screenwriter outside a
repertory theater in Pasadena, after becoming convinced that the man had sinister designs
on him. Much of the dark humor of the book comes from the contrast between Griffin’s
guilt, as hefeels a police net growing tighter, and the banality of his daily life at the stu¬
dio. The amazing thing about Tolkin’s dialogue here is that Hollywood producers and
executives really do talk like this—not that it leads them to better ideas for movies.
from The Player
“Nobody leaves my office until we agree on fifteen reasons for why we go to the
movies.” Levison looked around the room. “Alison, when was the last time you
bought a ticket to see a movie?”
Alison Kelly, his story editor, covered her face with her hands. “I am so em¬
barrassed,” she said. “But I just hate to stand in lines. I think it’s been two
months. What can I say, I go to screenings]”
Levison stood up. “From now on, everyone in this room has to go to a movie
theater and pay to see a movie, sneak previews don’t count, at least once a
month.” He turned to Griffin. “Griffin, when was the last time you bought a
ticket to see a movie?”
2J8
The Business
“The Bicycle Thief, last night.” As soon as he said it, he realized what he had
done. He had confessed.
“Okay,” said Levison, “why did you go?”
“Because it’s a classic and I’ve never seen it.”
“And why didn’t you have it screened?”
“I wanted to feel the audience reaction.”
“What was the reaction?”
“They loved it.”
“Who were they?”
“People who hate the movies we make.” Better to go on the attack. Maybe
not.
“Did you like it?”
“It’s great. Of course.”
“No remake potential?”
“We’d have to give it a happy ending.”
“What if we set it in space, another planet. The Rocket Thief 1 ” He was grin¬
ning. This was a joke.
“A poor planet?”
“There you go,” said Levison. “Right away we’re talking about something
we’ve never seen in a science-fiction film, and that’s a poor planet. How come
space is always rich?”
“Luke Skywalker’s farm in Star Wars was pretty run-down.”
“Fine,” said Levison. “And it worked, and what I’m saying is, that’s why we
have these meetings, to come up with images, to come up with characters and
story ideas, so we’re not at the mercy of whoever comes through the door. So
we can contribute, so our own ideas can get made. Now. Let’s start at the be¬
ginning. Why do we go to the movies? Give me some reasons.”
Hands were raised. Levison ran to the always ready easel with its large tablet
of clean poster paper and, with a marking pen, quickly scribbled one through
fifteen.
“One,” he said. “Griffin went to see a classic. This list should not be in any
special order of priority. You’ll notice I don’t want to start with the cliches, like
escape or entertainment. So we’ll say—and this is a legitimate reason to go to
the movies—we’ll say, ‘We go to see classics.’ ” He wrote CLASSICS on the paper.
Then he wrote next to two, entertainment, and next to three, escape.
“Mysteries,” someone said, mysteries was added.
“Doesn’t anyone go to the movies for sex?” asked Levison. “Don’t guys
choose movies that they hope will turn on their girlfriends?” Levison grinned
and wrote sexual provocation.
“New fashions?”
STYLE.
Michael To 1 k i n
IS 9
“I like driving fast after a James Bond film
ENERGY.
“What about movie stars?”
STARS.
“I’m always happy looking at Paris.”
TRAVEL.
“Comedy.”
LAUGHS.
“Horror films.”
SCREAMS.
“Songs.”
SONGS.
“Love stories.”
LOVE STORIES.
“Are we talking about types of movies or reasons that we go?” Drew asked.
“Whatever gets you to the theater,” said Levison.
“I like the crowd,” said Drew. “I like other people.”
COMMUNITY.
Griffin pressed back into the green couch. He thought about excuses. First
he would have to say something to the people in the room. Once the body was
discovered, and it was already in a morgue, he knew that someone would say,
“This writer was killed outside that theater you went to last night, Griffin, did
you know that?” And he would answer, “That’s the last time I go out in public.”
Some kind of light remark to get away from the specific murder into the terri¬
tory of a world gone mad.
“Sometimes,” said Drew Posner, “I have to admit I go to the movies not so
much for escape—well, I guess it’s a kind of escape, but it’s more—it’s for com¬
fort. It’s sort of everything, it doesn’t matter what kind of film, just as long as
it’s a movie.”
COMFORT.
“I know they’re not popular now,” said Mary, “but I’ve always liked big cos¬
tume epics.”
PERIOD.
“Fair enough,” said Levison. “The point of this exercise is to think about what
we like, not what we think we should like, or what we think the public will like
or what we think the public already likes. And that’s fifteen. Let’s get sixteen.
Who’s going for it?”
Griffin raised his hand. “Usually I go to the movies to see what everyone else
is seeing, so I can talk about it, so I don’t feel left out. When I was in the fourth
grade, all the cool kids in my class had seen The Great Escape. I hadn’t. But I acted
like I had.”
26o
The Business
Levison held the chalk to the board, trying to find the one word.
“Try lemmings,” said Drew.
PEER PRESSURE.
“Now that we know why we go to the movies, the next step will be to look
for projects that engage us on these basic levels. Class dismissed.”
Evekett Weinbekcer.
It is possible in the film industry to make a great deal of money by doing nothing other
than being the person to whom a great deal of money is paid. Michael Tol kin’s novel and
Robert Altman’sfilm The Player describe middle-level Hollywood executives with very
high salaries but ill-d fined skills and duties, who deftly networkfrom one position to an¬
other without ever accomplishing anything except maintaining their position in the rat
race. The challenge is to climb onto the spinning treadmill in thefirst place, and that is
what Weinberger’s Wannabe is about. He was a junior functionary trying to move up
the ladder past others, who, because they were playing the same game, knew exactly who
and what he was and understandably had no interest in helping him succeed.
from Wannabe
Once on the Disney lot, I headed to the Animation Building, site of those dis¬
appointing rounds of interviews several months back. I climbed the stairs toward
the rarefied air of the executive offices. If the rest of the building seemed squeaky
clean, this floor was air-blasted. People there walked briskly with an air of
hyper-importance. “I’m on a mission from God,” they seemed to be saying.
I walked past Jeffrey Katzenberg, the diminutive head of Disney production,
who administered and shaped every Disney release. He was famous in the in¬
dustry for his workaholic schedule, his hundred phone calls a day, his pit-bull
tenaciousness. Like Eisner, he had grown up as a rich kid in Manhattan, and by
age fourteen he had begun working on what would become a seven-year stint
for New York City Mayor John Lindsay, dropping out of New York University
Everett Weinberger
261
along the way. He eventually left politics for the movie industry, working as as¬
sistant to Barry Diller and moving his way up to head of production at Para¬
mount.
Katzenberg was the counterbalance to Eisner, the nudger alongside the in¬
novator. Eisner was known to call him the Golden Retriever for his consistent
ability to sniff out new stars and profitable projects. Katzenberg moved with Eis¬
ner from Paramount to Disney in 1984. Ref erred to as “Sparky” in Celia Brady ’ s
acerbic column on the industry in Spy magazine, he was the embodiment of those
Disney qualities many industry insiders hated: the pennypinching, the need for
total control over creative elements, the formularization of the creative devel¬
opment process, and the nightmarish work schedules. Legend had it that when
he showed up to work in the early morning hours and spotted other cars in the
parking lot, he would feel their hoods to see if the other executives had just
sneaked in ahead of him. Alec Baldwin was said to have called Katzenberg the
eighth dwarf, Greedy.
Sparky Katzenberg was standing next to one of his secretaries’ desks. I nod¬
ded at him and he nodded back, thinking I was someone important, given that
I was headed purposefully toward the big cheeses’ offices. Also, I looked pretty
good in my business suit and Hollywood tie, like I belonged in the executive
suite. He’d soon learn that I was just another peon, so I enjoyed it while I could.
I continued to the end of the hallway, and sucked my breath in as I saw a
knockout blonde with a perfectly toned body. I assumed she was one of Frank
Wells’s two assistants.
“Hi, I’m from Right Connections. I’m Everett Weinberger.” I smiled and ex¬
tended my hand.
She shook it extremely hard and inspected me. “Tracy Taylor.” Blunt, effi¬
cient, impassive. Hmmm, now where have I seen this type of person before? It
hit me soon enough—she was the female version of Brad Dorman.
“Have a seat. I’ll have some work for you in a minute.”
I sat at the desk parallel to hers and waited, thinking what my opening line
would be when I met Wells.
Tracy placed a huge bundle of mail on my desk. “Here, you can begin slit¬
ting the mail and stamping the date on it—always on the upper right-hand cor¬
ner.” So much for executive-level tasks. I was intrigued, however, by the
prospect of reading Frank Wells’s mail.
Several minutes later, Tracy flicked hereyesatme and noticed that I was doing
slightly more reading than opening. “You’ll have plenty of time to read later.
For now, just stick to opening the letters.”
There was a palpable sense of movement on the floor and I knew Wells was
approaching. It wasn ’ t that you could actually feel his power, but you could hear
and see people’s reactions as he passed by.
“Morning, Terry, Anne. That is the prettiest dress.” I heard girlish laughter
262
The Busi ness
from down the hall. You don’t become president of Disney without knowing
how to flirt.
“Tracy, have you got the Euro-Disney file?” He called out even before he was
in sight. This man knew how to maximize his time. Tracy, in turn, knew how
to maximize her brownie points. She had the file stretched out in her hands be¬
fore he even reached her desk.
“Morning, Frank. That is a great tie.”
She pointed to me without taking her eyes off Wells. “Frank, this is Everett
Weinberger replacing Sue for the week.” 1 smiled and looked at him expectantly.
Wells grunted and barely turned his eyes in my direction. As he turned to go
into his office, and with my heartbeat accelerating, I called out. “Mr. Wells?”
He and Tracy turned their heads toward me in surprise. Tracy immediately
frowned and looked nervous. You don’t speak until spoken to.
“I know your son Kevin from Stanford ...”
He immediately smiled broadly, strode to my desk, and shook my hand.
“Hi! Welcome to Disney. So, you were in undergrad or business school with
Kevin?”
“Business school. And I saw you speak on campus last spring.” He had visited
Stanford and given a speech in Bishop Auditorium on the Disney turnaround
story.
He nodded and grinned. “Great, great. Good to have you here!” Touche,
Tracy!
After he left, Tracy sullenly gave me some more mindless tasks to do. I re¬
alized that my encounter with Wells was strike one in her eyes.
My initial reaction would prove accurate. Tracy was like the hundreds of Brad
Dormans who filled the junior ranks of Hollywood. But unlike him, she was a
very pretty woman and a skilled flirt, at least with higher-ups she needed some¬
thing from. The tone of her voice gave away whether she was addressing some¬
one in a position of power or giving a minion an order.
Though Wells did not usher me in as a confidante andgive me top-level strate¬
gic planning assignments, he did occasionally come directly to me and ask me
to run some errands for him. This bugged Tracy, who, understandably, wanted
me as far from her boss as possible.
Later that same day, when Tracy was away from her desk, Wells asked me
to deliver a package across the lot. “No hurry on that, Everett—just make sure
it gets there by two o’clock.” 1 decided to wait and deliver it during my lunch
break. Tracy returned, saw the package on my desk, and stood in front of me.
“Did Frank give you that to deliver?”
“Yes. He said to do it when I had a chance, so I’m going to deliver it at
lunchtime in twenty minutes.”
“I think you should go now and get it out of the way.”
“Well, I think it makes sense to combine it with lunch at noon.”
Everett Weinberger
263
“You better go now. Believe me, I know when Frank says ‘sometime during
the day,’ he means now."
“But Tracy, he would have said ‘Now.’ He said just to get it there by two.
It’s all the way across the lot and—”
“That’s twice you snapped at me,” she hissed, her face inches from mine.
“Don’t you ever contradict me again because you’ll be out of here in ten seconds
otherwise. I place one phone call to personnel and you’re gone! So don’t do that
ever again! I won’t stand for it! Do you understand?”
I stared at her. “I’m sorry, Tracy . . . I—I didn’t mean anything by it.” I caved
in totally. I was shaking slightly, I was so angry. But if I displayed any of this rage,
I’d be fired. Though she was wrong, I had to acquiesce. I managed a really piti¬
ful look and hated myself for it.
“That’s all right. Now after you deliver that, you can take lunch early.” And
with that, she actually smiled. Her transformation was frightening. One minute
she was practically firing me; the next, she was my best friend.
Every day, Tracy would leave work with two canvas bags filled with piles of
papers and breathlessly, but contentedly, complain to all who were within
earshot. “Uhhh . . . I have so much work to do tonight. . . so much! Frank needs
all of this by nine tomorrow morning.” I never could figure out how mundane
secretarial tasks could fill two bags with work every night. Wells, after all, had
an executive assistant who worked on the more analytical projects. But Tracy
was a dedicated Disney staffer, eager to follow company norms.
“Congratulations, Everett!” A female voice blared through the phone receiver,
waking me up from an unfitful sleep on Friday, my last day at Frank Wells’s of¬
fice. Doesn’t anyone sleep past seven in Hollywood? My mind went blank for
a minute before I recognized Barbara Dreyfus’s throaty voice. It had been six
days since my first-round interview with her for the position of assistant to Alec
Baldwin.
“You did very well. Let’s just say that based on what I told him, Alec loved
you—and that’s an understatement . . . Heh-low! Are you there? Aaaa-lekk
Baldwin wants to meet you!”
“Th-that’s g-great,” I stammered.
“You bet your ( crackle) that’s great. I’m having (hiss) see only three people
(crackle) my number one choice (crackle, hiss) car phone (crackle) tunnel (crackle)
today at five-thirty, okay?”
I thought of the horrors of having to ask Tracy if I could leave work early,
and shuddered. “Actually, is Monday possible? I have to work for Frank Wells
today at Disney until six.” I thought name-dropping would aid my cause, but it
had no effect on Barbara.
She seemed slightly miffed. “No, it most definitely isn’t. Alec is in town just
264
The Business
until tomorrow and i s flying to Brazil with Kim for several weeks and then (hiss,
crackle, crackle, hiss) when he’ll be back. Now if you want this amazing position
which is yours for the taking, I suggest you be there today. . . . All right?” Why
doesn’t she hype me just a little more about this job?
“Okay, okay. Today will be fine then.”
“Terrific. Knock ’em dead, Ev!”
An hour later, I was on my way to Disney. 1 took the scenic route through Bev¬
erly Hills, as I needed extra time to think. I drove along Beverly Drive, one of
my favorite streets in the city. It was L. A. as a picture postcard, a dizzying array
of multi-million-dollar mansions built behind two perfectly spaced rows of fifty-
foot palms that flanked the road. The street seemed to reach its apex at Sunset
Boulevard with the otherworldly perfection of the lush, salmon-colored Bev¬
erly Hills Hotel, known as the Pink Palace. Built in 1912, the hotel was now
owned by the Sultan of Brunei.
As I followed the stream of cars snaking north along Coldwater Canyon to¬
ward Burbank, I rehearsed the conversation I had to have with Tracy in my mind,
not liking any of its variations. I needed to leave an hour early, and 1 knew that
she was not going to like it.
“Tracy, I ’ ve got a very important interview. ” “Tracy, I’m feeling really sick. ”
“Tracy, my brother is getting married tonight.” “Tracy, I’m going to beat you
to death with this stapler if you don’t let me go.”
I arrived at quarter to nine, a bit late due to the horrendous traffic. She
hadn’t come in yet. I frowned; clearly, something extraordinary had to have hap¬
pened for Wonder Girl to show up late for work.
She rushed in at nine-thirty looking uncharacteristically disheveled and im¬
mediately got on the phone, sobbing to her friends: She had smacked her gor¬
geous red Jeep Wrangler into a school bus. She was fine, but the Jeep was a mess.
I sympathized with her, but soon grew weary of the story, having heard it at least
twenty times, as she told it to everyone who came in or called.
I waited until later in the morning when she had settled down to her work.
“Uh, Tracy?”
“Uh-huh?” She didn’t look up from her desk.
I opted for honesty. “Tracy, I need to leave an hour early today for a very im¬
portant final-round interview.” Her head jolted up and I spoke faster. “Believe
me, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t crucial or ifl could get out of it. The interview’s
at five-thirty, so I need to leave here at five. I know today’s a bad day for you,
but is it okay with you?”
“Sure . . . sure, no problem. Don’t worry about it—I’ll be fine.” Well, that
seemed a tad too easy.
Everett Weinberger
26 j
Ten minutes later, Tracy called me on the phone in the file room. “Harriet
of Right Connections is on line two for you.”
I picked up line two. “Everett, how can you do this to us?” Harriet wailed.
“It’s just not professional,” chimed in Pauline.
“Wh—what are you talking about?”
“You can’t just leave a job in the middle.” “It’s just not professional.” Two
on one again.
“You have an obligation to Disney and to us.” “It’s your last day there, any¬
way. We know you’ll do the right thing and stay.”
“Wait a minute . . .” My hand involuntarily began massaging my suddenly
throbbing temple. “First of all, it’s just an hour early. Second of all, I asked Tracy
for permission not ten minutes ago and she said okay—no problem.”
“Please, Everett, Disney is our most important account and Frank Wells is
the president, for God’s sake.” “Don’t do it, Everett, you’ve gotta stay.”
“But she just said it was totally okay! Wells is out of the office on business,
anyway. There’s not much to do here today. And why didn’t she say anything
to me?”
“She sure did say something. She immediately called the head of Human Re¬
sources at Disney and screamed about the temps at Right Connections.” “She
just had a very severe car accident, for God’s sake. She may need to leave early
for the hospital to get an X-ray.”
“Hospital?” I sneered. “She looks fine to me. Listen, if it’ll make you feel bet¬
ter I’ll talk to her right now, and if she asks me to stay, I promise you I’ll stay.
No problem at all . . .”
“That’s all we’re asking.” “Do the right thing.”
I hung up the phone and walked slowly back into the office and stood in front
of her desk.
“Tracy?”
She looked up at me with an angelic smile. A choir girl. “Yeah?”
“I didn’t know you weren’t feeling well. Do you need me to stay until six?”
“Well, I do have a little headache and I might also leave early, but don’t worry
about it. You go on to your interview.”
“Tracy, that’s not what I just heard. I got off the phone with Right Connec¬
tions begging me to stay. Now, if you need me to stay, it’s no problem at all—
I swear. Just say the word and I’ll stay.”
“No, you can definitely go. Don’t worry, I’ll be all right.”
“Are you sure, now? Because if there’s any doubt at all . . .”
“Yes, I’m sure.” She smiled broadly. “You can go . . . really.”
“It’s really okay? Because—”
“Listen,” she said in a stem but friendly voice. “I’m telling you, it’s all right.
I wouldn’t say it was all right if it wasn’t. Now not another word on this.”
266
The Business
She looked at me and smiled with total warmth, like a mother who has just
reprimanded her son. I felt relieved. The head of personnel must have misun¬
derstood. Tracy couldn’t possibly have lied so convincingly. No one was that
good—it would be too evil. Plus, I really needed to go on the interview.
Tracy left the office early, at four-thirty, with her usual two overstuffed can¬
vas bags. A severe concussion could never stop Supergirl.
“Hey, feel better, Tracy!” I called out and grinned.
“Don’t worry about me.” She beamed at me with her Pepsodent smile. “And
good luck on your interview!”
“Thanks.” Maybe I had judged her unkindly after all.
I was lying in bed at ten-thirty in the morning, several days after my interviews
with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, feeling restless and bored. It was my sec¬
ond day in a row without a temp assignment. I grabbed the remote control and
began channel surfing. I could find nothing more amusing than the ending of a
Joy of Painting episode with Bob Ross, a white guy with a seventies-style Afro
and a soothing voice. I always found him hypnotic.
“Let’s build us today a happy little cloud. I’m gonna take a little titanium white
right on the of two-inch brush. And let’s go up in here and just drop in an in¬
dication of some little clouds that live up here . . .Wherever. . . It doesn’t mat¬
ter where . . . Wherever you think they should live; that’s exactly where they
should be.” That’s why I liked him; in Bob Ross’s microcosm, you could do no
wrong.
I followed that with a repeat episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. I dis¬
placed all brain waves for the momentand listened while Robin Leach described
today’s fabulous story of excess.
“His name is Adnan Khashoggi,” the Englishman began in stentorian tones.
“This multi-billionaire is at home in any one of his twelve fabulous homes in the
world’s most glamorous cities. Whether driving around in one of his eighteen
Rolls-Royces or jetting the globe in one of his five custom-made jets, Adnan
Khashoggi is a true cosmopolitan!
“His hilltop retreat overlooking the beach at Saint Tropez,” he continued, his
voice rising to a crescendo, “is worth a fabulous thirty-five million dollars!”
I flicked the television off, comforting myself with the thought that if I had
that kind of money, I would not flaunt it on national television.
The phone rang, and I lunged to answer it.
“I’m sorry, Everett.” “We did what we could do.” The Harriet and Pauline
show.
“W-what are you talking about?”
“He doesn’t know.” “We better tell him.”
267
Everett Weinberger
“Tell me what?” I was starting to worry.
“Disney.” “Tracy went ballistic.”
I sat up in bed. “what?”
“She called up the head of personnel yesterday and demanded that you be
blacklisted from Disney.” “We had no choice, Everett—it was either you or us.”
“She did what now?”
“The head of personnel told us that either we blacklist you from future Dis¬
ney temp assignments or we won’t get any more Disney contracts.” “They’re
our biggest client by far, you know.”
I was sputtering with rage. “B-but you know that after we spoke she said it
was okay to leave. I told her I’d stay, but she smiled at me and wished me luck.
She practically ordered me to leave . . . Believe me, I wouldn’t have left if she
had told me to stay.”
The Right Connections women were surprisingly supportive. “We know—
it’s not the first time she’s given our temps trouble. She has a reputation.”
“We’ll take care of you though. We’ll have to keep you away from the creative
side for now and see if we can work you into other areas at Disney.”
“1 can’t believe this . . . it’s—it’s beyond evil.”
“We know, honey.” “Don’t take it personally.”
I hung up the phone, wanting to cry. I didn’t even care that much about not
being able to work at Disney. What enraged me was that Tracy, representative
of many young people in Hollywood, was at least as mean as she was success¬
ful. Her beautif ul facade hid her true disposition. I also couldn ’ t stand the emas-
culating feeling of not being able to retaliate, utterly powerless in the face of
such outrage. I wondered if Wells knew of Tracy’s behavior outside of his pres¬
ence and momentarily considered relating to him the whole episode.
I settled into a routine of single-day temp assignments, and the next few weeks
passed in a blur. Then, several events shattered the calm.
At first I didn’t recognize the pretty blonde sitting alone in the nearly empty
Jack in the Box restaurant, but I knew I’d met her somewhere. I was bleary-
eyed tired that Friday night from a week’s worth of temping in the television
commercial sales department at local station KTLA, and in no mood to think
about what to eat, so I had allowed myself the cheap luxury of fast food. I was
so hungry that I didn’t even bother looking for a restaurant with a drive-thru
window.
“Fries, filet of fish, Diet Coke and . . . that’ll be it. To go, please.” I glanced
behind me again, my eyes focusing now on the blonde, her hair tied in a neat
ponytail, an overstuffed tan canvas bag beside her. Tracy Sure-You-Can-Leave-
Early Taylor! Good God! Alone, on a Friday night, hunched over a soggy burger
268
The Business
i n an antiseptic Jack in the Box on Santa Monica Boulevard. With a gentle look
on her face, she barely resembled the Doberman who had barked at me so vi¬
ciously.
Unconsciously, I pulled out bills and handed them to the cashier, my body
turned sideways so I could continue watching her. Here was a portrait of the
wannabe. No outsider who envisioned the career path of a movie executive
would ever stop and consider the nights I, Tracy, and many other hopefuls
spent in places like this.
I had built her up in my mind as a monster, and yet, seeing her in the vul¬
nerable state, I forgave Tracy at that moment. Should I go over and talk to her?
No, I decided. She’d be sure to resurrect her defenses and proffer some excuse
for being there. She’d have said that she was doing top-secret research on fast-
food chains for Frank. Then I’d hate her all over again. Instead, I grabbed my
bag and headed home.
Sex and Scandal
John Kobal
John Kobal was a writer, a critic and fan of the movies, and a gifted interviewer, whose
People Will Talk is an invaluable collection of interviews with Hollywood legends who
opened up to a startling degreefor him. Perhaps that was because he was also the founder
and proprietor of the Kobal Collection, which began as his private collection of movie star
photos and expanded until it became one of the largest archives of movie-related pho¬
tographs in the world. He knew so much about his subjects that perhaps they thought he
mi ght as well know the rest. One of his most challen ging subjects was M ae West, and here
you can see how he wins her conjidence and gets her talking and sits back, delighted.
“Mae West”
Mae West was born into an era of America’s history when signs of the new na¬
tion’s success were forests of chimney stacks billowing pollution into the sky to
herald the cities mushrooming up beneath. A man’s worth then could be mea¬
sured by his girth; a woman’s charms by ample curves that made her look like
a scenic railroad. When Mae (the woman who put the giggle into “gigolo”) fi¬
nally struck it big, it wasn’t with the plays on contemporary themes that gave
her early notoriety (Sex, The Drag and such), but by going back to her own roots
on the Bowery and to the dreams that had fueled her rise from barroom boards
to the heights of the legitimate stage, Broadway.
Mae’s earliest theatrical experiences had been as Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin
and in other such celebrated child roles (Mae was always small for her years),
but in between acts she entertained as a “coon-shouter”* from which she got that
♦The term “coon-shouter” came from the Old South, where black slaves used to chase raccoons out of hiding to
make them easier targets. The tag stuck, and when in vaudeville black music became acceptable entertainment
for white audiences, performed by blacks, not in white- or black-face but as themselves, they became known as
271
272
Sex and Scandal
sassy delivery, that sashaying walk—like a sailor back on dry land after months
at sea—and her lifelong love for the black-soul sound that could have made her
one of the great white blues-singers, a talent overshadowed by the immortality
she gained, drawing on another of her earliest-learned skills as an impressionist
of the famous vaudeville stars of her youth. She re-created the two most
celebrated symbols of self-made wealth and beauty of her era, the legendary rail¬
road tycoon “Diamond Jim” Brady and the beauty who set the standard for
generations of young girls, Lillian Russell, the actress Brady showered with di¬
amonds. Mae took the best parts of both and gave the world Diamond Lil, the
first white woman with a black soul.
By the time she took the Silver Chief to Hollywood in 1932, Mae wasn’t a
little girl from a little town trying to make good in the big city, she was a big
girl from a big town she’d already conquered. She’d come to save the ailing Para¬
mount studio from going under with the box-office returns from her first star¬
ring film, a somewhat cleaned-up version of her nationally known Diamond Lil.
To appease puritan outrage the film version was retitled She Done Him Wrong,
and so that Mae’s character wouldn’t be confused with the notorious theatrical
Lil, they renamed her Lou. The guardians of public morality were happy with
their silly victory.
She Done Him Wrong rescued Paramount from an MGM takeover by grossing
$ 2 million, a formidable sum considering that film tickets in 1933 cost 1 o cents,
and lent an additional meaning to the popular song “Brother, Can You Spare a
Dime?” In the depths of the Depression, when people lived on nothing and some¬
times less, for ten cents Mae gave them back confidence and the notion of a time
in America when a man’s, or a woman’s, get-up-and-go was all that was needed
to gain fame, fortune, a bed of roses and a safe full of diamonds. People by the
millions, hungry and dispirited, shelled out their precious dimes (enough for a
meal) to see her strut her stuff, lick the liars, outwit the politicians at their own
game . . . and when she rolled her eyes over a good-looking guy, an audience
could feel the goose on their own bottom. Mae’s Diamond Lil was a raffish, healthy
reaffirmation of what an American was capable of achieving in the home of the
brave and the free.
Mae’s arrival on screen is in a horse-drawn barouche pulling up in front of
“coon-shouters." Down, dirty, funky and blue, they chased white entertainment up the vaudeville tree. Mae even
as a child knew a good thing when she heard it, and she took it for herself. By the time, years after, when she had
hit her own stride, the term had dropped from the vocabulary, with Mae (he sole and soul beneficiary. I’d always
had a hunch—nothing sure, just an instinct from watching her perform, trading quips with the black help, not like
mistress and servant but like two girls in the dressing room, and from the way she sang—that the oft-hinted-at
secret in Mae’s past was a touch of color in her blood. I could never get Mae to admit anything like that when I
delicately broached the subject, because I felt that she shouldn’t be making rock ’n’ roll records, but rather the
old blues the way they should be sung. The idea really appealed to Mae, but she just explained that her afTinity for
black music was because it’s the best there is. She djed with all her secrets intact.
John Kobal
2 73
her Bowery place of work. As she gets out, she greets a poor widow woman
and her little girl with a tip and a friendly pat on the kid’s head. As Mae nee Lil
now Lou saunters through the swinging doors into the bar, the widow woman
says, “You’re a good woman, Miss Lou,” to which the nonchalant Mae replies,
“Best woman ever walked the streets.” In one swift establishing scene Mae had
won over mothers (of which there were many) and the poor (of which there
were more). Not everyone liked Mae, though. When somebody told her that
the jam-packed premiere of I'm No Angel at Grauman’s Chinese Theater was no¬
ticeably lacking Hollywood’s elite, Mae put Tinsel Town in its place, saying she
liked it that way because “I prefer to play to the best peopl e. ” Hollywood ’ s churl -
ish attitude lasted no longer than it took to cash in on Mae’s success. When
MGM’s sex star, Jean Harlow, started to sass her way to comedy success (black
maids and all), Mae’s victory was complete.
By the time I met Mae, in 1970, almost as many years had elapsed since she
brought her most famous creation to the screen as had separated that film from
the era of Brady and Russell, and by now she had become as much a legend on
the American scene as the prototypes for her fame. Once Mae had found Lil,
she never really deviated from it—it was the skin that suited her best, and sub¬
sequent roles, on stage or screen, whether in a contemporary setting or as a his¬
torical heroine like the Empress of Russia in Catherine Was Great, were really the
further adventures and conquests of her Lil. Unlike other performers who made
a name by impersonating famous faces and voices of the screen, especially her¬
self (Mae always had a great fondness for male impressionists), neither Brady
nor Lillian Russell was much more than a dim name to the people Mae appealed
to on Broadway or in movies, and as a result she was never handicapped by com¬
parisons. In the end, she believed in her creation and saw it as an extension of
herself in much the same way the paying fans did. Talking to her about Lil was
like talking to Mae about herself. It may have been the woman I met, but it was
the legend I saw. She was Lil.
I did have an exceptional and unique illustration of Mae’s gifts as an impres¬
sionist, in a location as bizarre and unexpected as the performer she momen¬
tarily re-created. I had no tape recorder to capture the moment for posterity,
but I wasn’t likely to forget Mae doing Sarah Bernhardt in a Chinese restaurant
in downtown Los Angeles one night in 1974. There were four of us, Mae; Paul
Novak, her friend, bodyguard, chauffeur, masseur, and, it was said, lover; Paul
Morrissey, the Warhol director who’d been wanting to meet her; and I. Din¬
ner was lively even though the subjects under discussion were the well-worn
paths of her career and sayings. In the middle of our meal, a semi-drunk black
man came over and stood by our table, not threatening, just waving on his feet.
He addressed Mae without preamble, as if to continue a conversation they
hadn’t finished the day before.
“How’s Ruby?” he asked. “Ruby,” said Mae. “Yeah, she worked for you.”
2 74
Sex and Scandal
“Oh,” said Mae, “yeah, she’s gone.” “When was that?” “Long ago now, deah.”
“Did she g o back t o N e w Yor k?” “Yeah, I think s o, deah. ” “You don ’ t have her
address, do you?” he wanted to know. “No, deah, no.” “She was a nice girl.”
“Yeah, very nice. Sweet,” Mae added. “Well, you’re looking good.” “Thanks,
deah.” “Well, it’s been good seeing you.” “Yeah, deah.” “See you around.” He
tipped his hand in salutation and ambled off the way he came.
“Who’s that?” we asked. “Don’t know, deah.” “Who’s Ruby?” Mae had no
idea. “But you sent her off to New York,” we persisted. “He sounded as if he
knew you.” Mae chuckled, “Oh they all do, deah.”
So, we were laughing and joking, and in that frame of mind I thought I’d see
if Mae really did remember or if she was just parroting a lifetime’s performance
in the role of Mae West.
What was Lillian Russell like? I wanted to know. Mae wasn’t totally sure any¬
more because in her mind she’d long ago confused Russell with her own mother,
probably the single most influential force in her own life. So, then, had she ever
seen Sarah Bernhardt, the legendary French tragedienne? I might just as well have
said Eva Tanguay or Anna Held, but, well, Bernhardt was a name familiar to all.
“Oh, sure,” Mae drawled and told of the New York actors’ benefit one Sunday
afternoon before the war. World War I, that is. “1912,” said Mae. We were
riveted. “What was Sarah like?” I asked. “Well, you know,” Mae said, maybe a
bit put off by my persistence in wanting to know about anybody except Mae
West, “it was so long ago, and she was talkin’ in French, you know.” But was
she good? “Oh, yeah, deah, sure . . . she was a great actress. ” “What did she do?”
Mae, instead of saying how or why she was good, went into an impression. Her
little hands with their long, hard, clawlike nails took on the melodramatic ges¬
tures of the actors of Bernhardt’s era that one can see in the pictures from those
days, the hands held out front, one up over her face, the fingers slightly curled
as if gripping some invisible force, and her voice became a low, rolling growl,
full of long rrrr's and words like "royame . . .deroyame. . .deroyame. . . .’’When
she had finished, one of the Paul’s asked Mae whether this was before or after
Bernhardt had lost her leg. “What’s that, deah?” “Well,” he explained, “Sarah
had to have a leg amputated.” “Oh, yeah, deah,” she answered after a little re¬
flection. “Must have been aftah . . . ’cause she was draggin’ things a bit.”
So, after that evening I always believed Mae, whether it was a story she told
for the first time or so often that everybody had lost count. Sort of her own “To
be or not to be,” like the story about the cop with the gun in his pocket, or her
advice to skinny girls, when she told them, “What the good Lord has forgotten
we’ll put there with cotton.” She never lost her timing for making things sound
fresh; and nobody was ever quite as delighted with Mae’s success story as Mae
herself. Back in England, I told friends about her Bernhardt in the restaurant,
and somebody asked me whether or not Mae had been any good. How the hell
John Kobal
27 £
would I know? I’ve never heard Sarah Bernhardt, but it sure sounded amazing
at the time.
Getting the interview on tape for posterity wasn’t as easy as egg foo yung and
a pair of chopsticks. Mae hesitated. She hadn’t let anyone do a taped interview
with her for more than a decade, and she didn’t want to spoil the impact of her
screen return by letting people hear her . . . “unless,” as she said, “the interview
is short and the questions are good. They have to be good, you know, whatever
they are. You’ve got to ask the right questions. You know.”
Mae had appeared at the Academy screening room, where they’d been hav¬
ing a seminar, showing a film followed by a question-and-answer session. After
the screening of I’m No Angel they brought in a chaise-longue and placed it cen¬
ter stage beneath a large potted floral growth. George Cukor, who acted as mod¬
erator, escorted Mae on. Slowly. She was in her elevator heels, towering over
him, her hair piled sky-high, looking like nobody else. She wowed the audience.
It was just her and Cukor up there onstage, talking. The standing-room crowd
screamed and hollered and made the whole thing into an event that was some¬
thing of a first of its kind for that time: “camp” was in the air even though it hadn’t
yet pitched tent in every comer bar in the land. The questions were planted,
the answers confident. The result was a triumph: the publicity for Myra Breck¬
inridge, still in production, was enormous. Mae felt good. So good, in fact, that
she lowered some of her reservations about letting me do the first “taped” in¬
terview she’d done in so many years. She promised to consider doing it. She had
to approve the questions. I had to have the interview. She was still reluctant to
be taped. We’d talk. She’d decide what questions she liked, which answers she
liked. We’d tape later. It was a start.
mw: Ohhhhh. Did you see that picture DoIIyl [Hello, Dolly! with Barbra
Streisand.] Because I want to look at it. I understand that she’s doing an
imitation of me. That’s a lot of nerve [pronounced “noive”]. Taking your
mannerisms and everything, and puttin’ it up there like it’s hers.
JK: Don’t you think it’s really a big compliment?
mw: No, no. She’s liable to continue doing everything that way, playing all her
parts. First thing you know, people will think it’s hers. Why should she
dare do this? As an imitation, fine, but you can’t imitate a person all
through a picture. I understand she copies my style all through the pic T
ture. She didn’t know how she wanted to play it and she thought of me,
and it just stuck with her and she couldn’t help it. I was never interested
in seeing other performers for ideas for my act. I was an individual and I
was developing my own personality, you see. I didn’t want anything from
anybody else that wasn’t me. I saw all the shows when I wasn’t working,
but I never copied them. I mimicked Eddie Foy and George M. Cohan . . .
276 Sex and Scandal
I did these great male impersonations . . . but that was mimicry, which is
different from taking tricks from people.
JK: Your mannerisms are classics. It struck me again watching you the other
night that, although you don’t smoke, you always have these long cigarettes
in your films.
MW: Ohhhh. I always have a cigarette for the characterizations. But I didn’t like
it. I used to have to hold it, but I never puffed. You never saw me inhalin’
or anything. I couldn’t wait till I gotrid ofit. But I had to do it, you know,
it was for the characters. When I played these, you know, very few women
smoked, they didn’t smoke in public in the ’20s. And they never had sex
symbols in films till I came. Or they called it something else, ’cause no¬
body used the word “sex” till I used it in my play, except to differentiate
between the male and female, like he’s of the male sex. ... So now, when
the studio sees somebody who looks like a sex symbol, they build it up
and stuff it down the public’s throat and keep telling the public that this
is a sex symbol till after a time people come to believe it. After I was called
a sex symbol and the studios saw how much money my films made, they
wanted others. But these were “synthetic.” When MGM were building up
Harlow, they came to me to ask me to write some stories for her, give
her some funny dialogue. That was a joke. I was breakin’ my neck writ¬
ing, casting and starring in my own films. If I thought of something funny,
I wasn’t about to give it to them!
JK: Not only funny, but racy too. Not dirty, but you did make movies that
helped bring the Hays Office down on Hollywood.
MW: Deah, when I knew that the censors were after my films and they had to
come and okay everything, I wrote scenes for them to cut! These scenes
were so rough that I’d never have used them. But they worked as a decoy.
They cut them and left the stuff I wanted. I had these scenes in there about
a man’s fly and all that, and the censors would be sittin’ in the projection
room laughing themselves silly. Then they’d say “Cut it” and not notice
the rest. Then when the film came out and people laughed at it and the
bluenoses were outraged, they came and said, “Mae, you didn’t show us
that.” But I’d show them the scripts they had okayed themselves!
JK: Where did you get this feeling for the underworld jargon? The way char¬
acters like Chick and Clogg and the others talked?
MW: Well . . . surely, you know ... I met characters, I met people, you talk
and listen to them, they talk that way, you know what I mean, slangy and
all. And I knew all that slang. I come from Brooklyn, New York, and a lot
of characters are there. I didn’t base my characters, like Gus Jordan and
those, on real people. They are all characters I made up. Yeah. No, the
whole thing just came. Well, you gotta watch all the pictures I made, it’s
John Kobal
277
the same way . . . they came to me. I never stopped, you know, I just made
one picture after another. You know, Klondike Annie and the circus pic¬
ture you saw the other night, I’m No Angel, you know.
JK: There were so many young people there, did you like that?
mw: Oh, God, yeah. Well, I expect this picture Myra Breckinridge will get both;
the older people will come out to see it, and I’ve got this young crowd.
It can’t miss.
At this point, nobody—including Mae—knew yet what the end of the film was
going to be. She felt that it should end with a great last line . . . hers. But the
film still had a week to shoot. At the moment she was still wondering what she’d
do after the film. One of the plans was to do the play Sextette in England, but
she said:
mw: I'd rather do another picture than do a spectacular for television. Because
I think my value is when they’ve got to pay money to see me. When they
start to see me on TV, they just turn you off and on, you know, they get
satisfied and then they say, “Oh, she’ll be on again,” and they just wait. I
want to make another picture before I do anything on TV. Somebody’s
talking to me about doin’ Sextette. I want to get Christopher Plummer for
that. Do you know him? I told Bob Wise after I saw that picture he did
with him, you know, Sound of Music, I said, “There’s your sex person.
There’s your box office. Him.” He carried that picture. She was all right,
you know, Julie Andrews, you know what I mean, to play a schoolmarm
or a nun, but she hasn’t got the sex personality. No, no, no. And unless
you put somebody in there with him who has it, it’s missin’. That’s why
I think that picture Star didn’t do so well. She hasn’t got it.
JK: I heard once that you rejected George Raft when you were making Belle
of the Nineties, even though you had worked with him in Night After Night,
your first film. Didn’t he have it?
mw: Sure. Ah, no, I’d ’a had him. But, you see, I would have had to co-star
with him again. This way I didn’t have to co-star with anyone. I just fea¬
tured them.
JK: Did you always cast your leading men yourself?
mw: Ohhh, yeah. Like I cast Cary Grant. And I cast Victor McLaglen for
Klondike Annie. Why I cast Victor was I was up to 142 pounds in that pic¬
ture, though you’d never know it. And I couldn’t get the weight off in
time, see, so I figured, well, I'd get McLaglen. He’s not only tall but wide,
a very thick look in his face, bulky, you know, big. And he’d make me
look thin. That’s how I put Victor McLaglen in. And then, of course, he
was perfect for the part of Bull Brackett. I think he gave a great perfor-
278
Sex and Scandal
mance. He got a sex personality. Ohhhhh, yes. He has it. That smile . . .
I always cast my leading men in my plays too. Of course, sometimes you
can’t always get what you want, so you take second best.
JK: It’s funny to hear you speak of “second best” . . . you’ve worked so hard
at maintaining your image, your “star.”
mw: Deah, I’ve had an easy, successful and happy life. Show me anyone at my
age who can do what I’m doing now and look the way I do and play the
parts I play. You know, most women when they’re forty [who is going to
argue with Mae West?) start having to play character parts. It should give
other people hope, deah. Ifl can do it, they can. It’s the body and the mind.
Keep your mind youthful-thinking and your insides have to be healthy and
young. I have a cold once in ten years.
I never wanted to be anyone else. I was satisfied to be myself. If I
wanted to be Florence Nightingale or Madame de Pompadour, I’d play
them for a short time till I got tired of the part. Well, I only ever wanted
to be a lion tamer. As a child I was always being told that the lion was the
king of animals and the most beautiful and ferocious beast, and my father
took me to see them and told me how they were the greatest. So years
later I wrote myself a part in I’m No Angel in which I played a lion tamer.
When I went into that cage, I felt at home because I had wanted to do this
so much since I was a child. There were about ten lions in the cage, if you
remember. That was no fake. They wouldn’t let me put my head in the
lion’s mouth, though. I wanted to, but they said they had to think of the
picture, and they got this woman who worked with the lions to do that.
I would’ve done it. Of course, when I think of it now, you couldn’t get
me into a cage with a lion for anything. So you see, deah, if I want to be
something else, I write it as a part and play it, but I never wanted to be
anyone else but me for long.
JK: And you’ve played that part since . . . when?
m w: Ohhh, I was in shows and in vaudeville when I was a kid. While I was work¬
ing, I had an aunt along to chaperone me, and there was a maid who
dressed me and all that stuff. I had a very proper family. We never used
any swearing or discussed sex at home. It’s strange, that, but I never
talked about sex with my parents. Even today I don’t like to discuss sex
with my sister . . .I’d feel dirty. The way I heard about sex first came from
a friend of mine when I was nine. Her mother was a doctor, and we were
playing in her house one day and there was this book lying there on the
table and after I read it I had a funny feeling about my parents. A peculiar
feeling—disgust, you might say. It took a long time for me to get over it.
They suddenly weren’t gods anymore. Ohh, I wish they wouldn’t teach
sex in the schools. They should teach health. Health is what is important.
John Kob a 1
279
But I never had much time to mix with other children, but I know I
never missed them. You see, I was so carried away with myself, my danc¬
ing, my singing, that I didn’t need other kids around. Besides, growing up
in show business makes you a lot smarter, and it gave me a standing in the
neighborhood.
]K: How did you break into show business?
mw: Well, I had a natural singing voice and my mother took me to singing and
dancing schools. Nobody else in our family had ever been in show busi¬
ness, but she had wanted to go on the stage when she was a young girl.
Her parents wouldn’t let her, they were very strict like that. But she
loved me being in the theater. I was crazy about my mother. But 1 never
liked my father much when I was small. I don’t know why, ’cause he never
laid a hand on any of us, you know, and he always provided good for us.
The only reason I can think of now why 1 wasn’t crazy about him was that
he smoked these big cigars. To this day I haven’t been able to stand cig¬
ars. He was a prizefighter in the beginning, a very handsome man, and later
he had a detective agency and then his own hansom-cab business.
JK: Is he the reason for your partiality to boxing and muscle men?
MW: No, I don’t think it’s because he was a fighter. I was never much around
businessmen because I wasn’t in that walk of life. I was in show biz and so
I went for that kind of man. I attracted athletes because I don’t smoke and
I don’t drink and I like to keep fit. That gets ’em. Yeah. . . .
Mae was always proud of her body. She maintained it and liked to have it ap¬
preciated and was not averse to having you feel her muscles. Back in the ’30s
Paramount photographer Bill Walling had done a couple of “at home” sessions
with her, and he was present the day Mae came to the gallery for a portrait ses¬
sion soon after she’d signed with Paramount. “She was wearing a slinky low-cut
dress that wasn’t covering much as it was, and all that flesh was making Gene
[the head of Paramount Portrait Gallery, who shot all the big stars like Diet-
rich, Lombard and, naturally, Mae West] a bit nervous. Gene was a staid sort
of guy, not very lively. But he knew his job. Mae was leaning over a round, glass
table cupping her head in her hands. The radio was on because she liked music.
These sessions could take a long time, and the music helped her to relax. This
was during the Depression, and there used to be a lot of these giveaway shows
on the air. This guy was forever offering dumb things to his listeners. He was
saying how he had these two cute little puppies to be given away. One had a
cute little brown nose, and the other had a cute little pink nose. And you were
to call in to say which one you wanted. Gene was behind the camera when Mae
said, ‘Hey, Gene.’ She’d taken out one of her big beautiful bazooms and put it
on the table. ‘Which one do you want? The one with the cute little brown nose
280 Sex and Scandal
or the one with the cute little pink nose?’ She was a real exhibitionist. Well,
Gene was so shocked he nearly knocked the camera over. She thought that was
real funny.”
MW: But you asked me about me and show biz. Well, when I was twelve, I had
gotten too mature for children’s parts, so I went back to living at home in
Brooklyn till I was sixteen, when I could get a work permit and go back
on the stage. While I was living at home, I used to do Sunday concerts for
various organizations like the Knights of Columbus. That sort of thing, you
know. And the first boyfriend that I remember was Joe Schenk—he was
about seventeen and I was fourteen. He was a pianist and had his own rag¬
time band, and Saturday nights they’d come up to our house to rehearse.
But I had an awful lot of boyfriends in those years at home, Joe was just
the first in long pants. I always had maybe one girlfriend at a time, but I
wasn’t much of a woman’s woman. Even then. My sister, Beverly, was a
lot younger than I was, so we never had much in common as children. But
later we were very close.
JK: So you got your first man when you were fourteen. How old were you
when you got married?
MW: I was seventeen. But I had lots of affairs before 1 married Frank Wallace.
But they were just love affairs, not sex-love affairs. We’d neck and hug
and kiss and play with each other, but no sex. Not till I got married. Prob¬
ably one of the reasons I did get married then was because of sex. Frank
and I were on the road at the time with our vaudeville act, so my parents
didn’t know, and before I agreed to marry him, I made him swear not to
tell my mother. We never signed into a hotel as a married couple. And
I’ll say that for him, he never told her and she never knew I was married
till the day she died. But Frank was a problem. Our marriage was a mis¬
take anyhow, even if the judge had tied us with a sailor’s knot, and Frank
kept on pressing me, making demands, wanting me to live with him in¬
stead of at home, but I wanted to be free. So I made up this story that my
mother wanted me to do a single act ’cause she thought it would be good
for my career. As he’d promised to not tell her, he never went to ask her.
I had really gotten this offer to work for the Shuberts in a show,* and I
didn’t want Frank around. While I was in their office one day, 1 heard that
they were casting a show that was going on the road, and they hadn’t a ju¬
venile, so I suggested Frank. I told him to come right over and he got the
♦Mae, still a brunette, played Maymie Dean, the “vamp,” in the Rudolf Friml musical Sometime, in which she in¬
troduced the “Shimmy-Shake" and sang “What Do I Have to Do to Get It?" That was in 1918, and she found the
answer.
John Koba 1
281
part and went on the road for a year. We stayed apart after that. And I
never got married again because there were enough men to choose from.
Besides, I was already married. Even if nobody else knew that, I did.
I suppose I never loved one man enough to settle down to marriage. I
was fickle because I had too much temptation. Marriage and one man for
life is fine for some people, but for me it wasn’t good. Every time I look
at myself, I become absorbed in myself, and I didn’t want to get involved
with another person like that. I saw what it did to other people when they
loved another person the way I loved myself, and I didn’t want that prob¬
lem. Because of that, I never wanted children and I never had any. I like
other people’s children, but I was my own baby. I had myself to do things
for. Get my act together, get my material, write my stuff, work. That’s
what I wanted.*
JK: And you got it. You did write all of your own lines, didn’t you, even in
your first movie?
MW: Yes, deah. You know, Louis B. Mayer never liked me because I wouldn’t
go and work for MGM after I’d made this big success in Night After Night
over at Paramount. That film took sixteen weeks to shoot. When 1 first
came out to the Coast, I sat around for twelve weeks drawing money and
I never saw a script. This wasn’t for me: either I worked or I wanted to
get back on the stage. But they kept begging me and telling me they had
a contract with me, so I told them to let me have a script and I would
rewrite it. “Hold it,” they said, “just your own scenes.” Well, it came to
shooting my first scene. Everybody was so slow with their delivery. The
film was going to sleep on me, I had to come in like a streak of lightning
or we’d all go to sleep. So I played my lines very smart, you know, never
giving the other actors time to think over their lines, and I’d be always
rolling on the axis and breaking into lines with an “Oh yeah” and an “Uh-
hummm.” You know, to keep the action flowing. And I was mad at Para¬
mount. I’d come from Broadway, where I’d been a top star, and here I
was playing this . . . you’d call it a guest part. And it wasn’t even ready
till I started to rewrite it. The night they screened it, I didn’t come along.
Then I got these phone calls telling me what a hit it was going to be and I
could have anything I wanted. They had no projects for me at Paramount,
so they came to me asking if I had anything I wanted to do. I had Diamond
Lil all ready and I gave it to them. The play department who got hold of a
copy wrote something on a foolscap-sized page to tell me why it wouldn’t
work on film. Well, deah, we shot it in two weeks and they called it She
*In fact, though she didn’t want it for her image, Mae was devoted to her sister, Beverly, and her brother, and
looked after them, supported them, till her death.
282
Sex and Scandal
Done Him Wrong. It saved the studio. I found out afterwards that MGM were
planning to buy Paramount if it went bust, and then my film made money
and the studio was okay.
JK: In Diamond Lil, how much is the character of Lil—or Lou, as it ended up
in the movie—based on you?
MW: Ohhh, well, if I were that character, if I were livin’ in that time, I’d do
exactly what I write about. That’s the way my mind runs.
J k : But is she expressing your own philosophy when she says, “Diamonds have
souls”?
MW: Oh, yeah, that’s all mine. Well, when she meets up with this good man,
he’s with the Salvation Army, the one who tells her that “Diamonds have
no souls.” That’s from his standpoint. Then she repeats it, you know what
I mean? So she’s leamin’, you know. She says, “When you’re dead, you’re
dead, that’s the end of it.’’Then he gives her a little of the Bible. See, she’s
surrounded by all these rough guys. You know, she says, “I’ve always ap¬
preciated good men.” I mean, good principle, good character, good in that
sense. Because I’ve met a lot of the other type of man. I wasn’t very reli¬
gious as a child or anything. Every time I went to Sunday School, I used
to come home with a headache. But, like I told you, we were brought up
strict, and later, when I was on my own, I kept the Ten Commandments
and that was enough. And I’ve always leaned towards . . . for myself, to
really be satisfied with a man, I have to feel that he’s right, and respect
him, you see. And that’s why I thought to put this character’s line in. Then,
as I was goin’ through the story and everything, I said, “I need a good punch
ending to follow all this great material, all this great stuff.” And I didn’t
know what to d o and I didn ’ t want to introduce another character, s o then
that’s when I figured that he was an undercover detective and I made a de¬
tective out of him. But I got all that goodness over, and her falling in love
with him when she thought he was with the Salvation Army.
JK: Well, you re-created that whole period effectively.
MW: Yeah, and I’ll tellyou why. My mother was taken many times, when I was
a child, for being Lillian Russell. She was the great American beauty for
years. Nobody took her place. It wasn’t like these, you know, movie
stars, these Miss America things they run every year, somebody new.
Here was a beauty that nobody could top. For years and years. And then
she was in this period, the clothes that she wore and everything. And then
I saw pictures of my mother when she was in her twenties or so, with all
these kinds of clothes on her and everything, and I was always fascinated
with it. That’s when I started to write. And my main reason, like I told
you, was I used to have 80 percent men in my audience, and I wanted more
women. That’s how I thought of that period. Then I got the grandmoth-
John Koba 1
283
ers and grandfathers, I got three generations. That really made me break
everybody’s box-office records all over. So Diamond Lil did the trick.
JK: But earlier, in the story of the play more than the movie, you have her
thinking only about her diamonds when Chick Clark almost kills her.
MW: Well, that character . . . she lived for her diamonds. I was that way when
I was about fifteen years old. I saw a great big diamond on Fifth Avenue
in one of those jewelry stores, hanging on one of those velvet busts, and
it was on a fine chain. It was about twenty-five carats of diamond, and I
fell in love with that diamond. And I’ve always thought of a diamond that
size. I’ve got to have one that big. I’ve got to have that diamond. And I
got lots of diamonds later, but every time I got one, I wasn’t thrilled
enough with it. I liked it, but I was still thinking thinking thinking of that
one. Finally, I got them that size. Know what I mean? Diamonds, ohhh-
hhh, they just did things forme. I wouldn’t wear a rhinestone. I wouldn’t
wear anything else unless it was the real thing. See, it’s only lately that
you have duplicates on account of robbery, and on account of jewelry being
so high to insure for. So for the stage I wear the imitation, you know. But
Lil was a character just like that.
JK: Do you still value diamonds that much? Because one thinks of diamonds
and one thinks of Mae West . . . and vice versa.
MW: Well, I’ve had so many, I’ve had so much diamonds, and now, because of
all these rhinestones they wear, the imitations and all that stuff that almost
look as good, I keep the real stuff in a vault. The last time I had my good
big diamonds out was when I went over to the college.* Well, I have so
many different sets that I wouldn’t have room for all of them. I just keep
them in a vault. When I took them out one day, it cost me $75 a week
just to have one out. This was the $45,000 diamond. So I put it back. It
made no sense. It was too expensive. It’s sad, but then they’ve given me
the imitations, which look almost as good.
JK: Mae, the public see your connection with diamonds as materialistic, yet
you always had some spiritualistic connection with them.
MW: Yeah?
JK: Well, in She Done Him Wrong you sold diamonds to pay for the upkeep of
an orphanage, and then sold more diamonds to pay for the lease on the
Salvation Army shelter . . . and you did it all anonymously. You are very
involved in the spiritual. . . .
MW: Ohhh, yeah. I see, yeah. Sure. And it was the strangest thing. I don’t know
*1 don’t know what occasion she is referring to here, and, short of a fraternity panty-raid party, I can only think
that she means one of the dinners in her honor that UCLA or USC gave as a result of the Mae West revival sweep¬
ing America at that time.
284
Sex and Scandal
if I ever told you, but while I was writin’ Diamond Lil, I had most of my
characters but no lead. And I said, “Now I’ve got to get one man in here
that she really falls in love with.” I thought, Gee whiz, and I didn’t know
what I was going to put in, whether it was a young society boy or what,
and I hesitated. And I was layin’ my whole story out, and I went down to
the Bowery just to look the place over because it was nothing like it was
in the old days. And that day I just rode down there again, just drove
around, you know, just, I don’t know, to feel the place. And first thing I
know, I saw this door that was open, and I saw an American flag in this
dumpy place, this old building, you know. And then I looked, and I was
drivin’ slowly and, first thing you know, this handsome Salvation Army
captain, without his cap on, came out. He walked out of this door, right
to the gutter at the end of the sidewalk, and I passed him slowly. He looked
into the car, and I said, “Uhmmmm, ahhhh, ohhhh,” and I suddenly felt
like drivin’ around the block again to take another look, ’cause he was so
handsome, and 1 thought, Gee, he should really be an actor. He was so
handsome. Then it dawned on me. The forces, even though I didn’t know
so much about them in those days, I thought, he should be a leading man.
Ohhhhh, yeah, a good man. A Salvation Army captain. He’s the guy to
come in and fall in love with her. He just walked out at the psychological
moment, see? I went to see the buildings, and here he was. I had a mirror
in my car, and as we were driving past, I looked in it, and I could see him
looking after the car and then turning around and goin’ back in. I don’t
know what he' came out for, it was just the forces made him come out,
now that I understand about the forces, they made him come out for me
to see him.
You know, sometimes 1 just lie down in a semidark room and I see
crowds, individuals coming in like a montage. Now, I’m a very normal,
healthy person, I don’t imagine things, so when I see things and hear
voices, I know there is something that exists around us. Over the years
I’ve developed my psychic powers. Every thing was a thought before it was
created. . . this table, this vase, they were a thought before we made them.
But I really didn’t get involved with ESP until I met Thomas Kelly in 1941.
The forces for good and evil were coming in, 1 would hear psychic voices
and see people all the time and they kept me awake at night. If you told
this to people about hearing voices, they’d think you were mad or some¬
thing. With Thomas Kelly, you know, he came to my house because I’d
heard so much about him from friends who knew I was interested in ESP.
He tied a bandage around his eyes while we all were told to ask questions
by writing them on a piece of paper and put that paper in a blank enve¬
lope so he wouldn’t know whose envelope he was feelin’. I wrote five ques-
John Ko ba 1
18 S
tions: “When will we be in the war? For how long? Who’ll win it?” and
two other questions of a very personal nature. When we came to my en¬
velope, he said, “In three months we’ll be attacked by Mr. Jap when he
blows up Pearl Harbor; we’ll be in the war for five or six years and Pres¬
ident Roosevelt will be up for a fourth term, but he won’t outlive it.” Then
he told me the personal things that I knew nobody else knew. I figured to
myself that if he could answer all those questions, there had to be forces
guiding him. He passed on, but he introduced me to a wonderful friend,
Dr. Richard Ireland.
Now, I know that I must have always had these voices telling me things:
One time I got a whole picture, Every Day’s a Holiday, it came to me in
fifty-six seconds, the length of time it took to play a chorus on the piano.
It took me fifteen minutes to tell it to my producer and director, who were
there at the time, and another forty-five minutes to dictate it to a typist.
It was one of my best pictures. When I began to understand more about
ESP in 1941, I realized that my having had the idea so quickly, the com¬
plete story, had something to do with the forces around us. You see, they
helped me several times when I was really in a problem and I didn’t know
how to get out of it. Like the court case I had. I was bein’ sued for $ 100,000
and I knew I was innocent, but I didn’t know how to handle the case. I
was lyin’ in my bed when suddenly this voice comes to me, a very beau¬
tiful, deep man’s voice speakin’ in that old English with “yea, thee and
thous” and this was in 1948, and I knew I had heard that voice before . . .
back in 1941 and I had always remembered it because it was very distin¬
guished. And now it told me what to say when I went into court that day,
and I won my case, so, you see, it works for you. It does good for you.
Ohh, yeah, after it was over, I wanted to know for myself what kind of
person the voice belonged to. I asked the dictionary about it and it opened
where it said “clergy”—so I knew he was a man from the clergy, you know,
back in the 18th or 19th century.
While we were driving back to her apartment after our Chinese meal, Mae was
talking about projects she had in mind, plays she was thinking of reviving, other
films she was going to do, and an offer from ABC for a television version of the
celebrated Diamond Lil. She was toying with the idea of the TV production, mus¬
ing about leading men she had in mind. She ran through a list of television stars
who’d caught her eye. She thought Rock Hudson was too old (this was in 1974!).
Unable to imagine who could fill her shoes, I blurted out: “But who could pos¬
sibly play Diamond Lil?”
Mae, who had been lying back, drew herself up and broke the shocked si¬
lence: “Why, Mae West of course!” and looked at me as if I’d lost my senses.
286
Sex and Scandal
Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Anger has two reputations. The larger one involves his notorious books Holly¬
wood Babylon (1958) and Hollywood Babylon II (1984), lurid compilations of
Hollywood scandal and gossip, some of it learned from his grandmother, a studio costume
mistress, who, like so many crew members, remained invisible while hearing everything.
Anger’s other reputation is as one of the most influential earlyfigures in the American
undergroundfilm, with work such as Fireworks (1947) an< ^ Scorpio Rising (1964).
Thefirst Babylon book, written with a breathless delight in the secrets behind Hollywood’s
car fully dejended images, helped create today’s era of supermarket tabloids and gossip
television.
from Hollywood Babylon
Just as an occasional sex-murder rendered some would-be starlet “front-page-
famous” for the space of one edition, sometimes a suicide would allow some ob¬
scure Hollywoodian those longed-for headlines for a brief flash of posthumous
fame.
In the grim, grinding years of the Depression, when even the once-famous
of the silents had their sleeping potion or gaspipe exits perfunctorily recorded
in the papers, it took some sob-sister angle or novel touch in technique of self-
destruction to make the blase editors sit up and take notice.
The suicides in the ranks of the starlets were of two distinct categories. One
was the “bid” that had the cards stacked so there was little likelihood of a fatal
issue—these were the ill-famed “publicity stunt” suicide attempts which des¬
perate climbers have resorted to in hope of achieving some form of public
notoriety—a last gamble. (Sleeping pills, preceded by a "Goodbye cruel Hollywood"
phone call were a favored method—but sometimes the “last-minute rescue” did
not come off and the starlet slept on— into oblivion.)
Kenneth Anger
287
The other order of suicide was another manner entirely—the starlet was
grimly earnest and determined to succeed, at least, in this one last melodramatic
gesture. The measure of bitterness and heartbreak felt by these former beauty
contest winners, screen-test winners, and would-be screen luminaries was re¬
vealed in the pains they took that the bizarre trappings or circumstances of their
murder scene played with themselves should not escape the eye of the film colony
that had found no use for them, and that their name— just once —should blaze
forth from the fourth estate.
Thus it was that a lovely young brunette named Arietta Duncan planned to
quit the scene in the grand manner, in the middle Thirties. Arietta’s tale was
typical of many others. In a “Girl from Every State Talent Contest” trumped up
by Universal Studios, Arietta, who had achieved local renown as Harvest Queen
in her home town of Belle Plaine, was brought to Hollywood as Miss Iowa.
Winning by the same roulette that had brought Clara Bow to Hollywood, Ar¬
ietta arrived in 1930 to a welcoming committee of Universal stars. Her screen
and voice tests were deemed promising enough—she had a good body and a
pretty face that Hollywood could gimmick up any way it chose. She was signed
to a starlet contract, and enmeshed in the Universal machine known as “The
Treatment. ” This meant studio flacks got her picture and mention in the fan mag¬
azines; a series of walk-on bits with a line or two in Universal films; gossip-
column mention through plants about a studio-manufactured romance with
featured-player Tom Brown, with whom she was seen wining, dining, and danc-
ing.
Arietta began to receive fan mail; she did well enough in another small part
to be considered for a featured role in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein.
She was tested; publicity shots were taken picnicking with Boris Karloff— some¬
body else got the part. Arietta had been in Hollywood five years and—from her
viewpoint—had gotten exactly nowhere. She couldn’t go back to Belle Plaine.
Her Hollywood caper had met with strong disapproval from her family. She’d
never live it down.
When Arietta Duncan decided to bow out, she loaded every vestige of her
Hollywood career in her roadster, and drove out Sunset Boulevard to Santa Mon¬
ica canyon, where she parked near a deserted field. She unloaded the messy ac¬
cumulation of five years’ memorabilia in the Film Mecca and carried it armload
by armload to the center of the field. There she made a pyre—feeding to the
flames her original Universal contract, clippings of herself as Harvest Queen and
Miss Iowa, a souvenir program from the Cocoanut Grove signed, “To Arietta—
In Memory of a Swell Evening—Tom Brown.” Also into the fire went bundles
of fan mail which included offers of marriage from Alaska and Singapore;
shooting-scripts with her few scenes underscored in red; stacks of standardized,
posed, publicity photographs. (Enough ill-consumed remnants were discovered
288
Sex and Scandal
later to identify the violator of the Santa Monica public trash-burning ordi¬
nance—but Arietta was beyond reprimand at that time.)
As the afternoon declined, Arietta drove back into Hollywood for the last
time, this time parking her car in the Hollywood hills, at the base of that steep
hillside which bore thirteen gigantic, lethal letters: each the size of a house, they
spelled out
HOLLYWOODLAND
constructed of metal scaffolding faced with sheet-iron. (The fancy nomencla¬
ture and its cumbersome erection on the hillside was the doing of Mack Sen-
nett, who sunk much capital in a real-estate scheme in the late Twenties to
promote the hillside area for fashionable Spanish villa homesites. The Crash made
quick work of the grandiose project and left Sennett without either property or
bank account.)
Arriving beneath the spelled-out taunt of the realm she could not conquer,
Arietta stripped off her skirt and blouse to uncover a brief little two-piece out¬
fit that had shown her advantages fetchingly in publicity photos.
It was as if all the publicity photographers in Hollywood were amassed below
as Arietta deftly climbed up the scaffolding supporting the towering "W." On
the summit—in the orange rays of the setting sun, Arietta then performed an
act never witnessed by the Universal publicity department: she peeled off her
skimpy bra, flung it to imaginary fans below, and the scanty panties followed.
Nude, facing the city which refused her a crown, Arietta flung herself into
thin air.
That should have been a merciful conclusion to her gesture. But no: Arietta’s
leap into space landed her square in a clump of prickly-pear cactus. When
the reporters turned up the next day to check out her letters—opened that
morning—telling them where to go to find “a broken body hiding a broken
heart,” they found instead a still-living though battered Arietta, whose delirious
thrashings, all night long in the cactus clump, had turned her into a livid human
pin-cushion.
Arietta’s agony lasted four days, during which a team of interns extracted
thousands of spines from her graceful, dying body. Qualis aitifex pereo!
Around 1930 there appeared in the United States a pharmaceutical product
which immediately became immensely popular, a sleeping pill called Seconal.
About ten pills were enough for a painless slumber that would last forever. There
were hundreds of Seconal suicides in Hollywood, where it was assured—for spe¬
cial reasons!—that the product would be well received. Starving extras, victims
of blackmailers, fucked and forgotten little hopefuls —but also many, many
celebrities!
289
Kenneth Anger
Among these candidates for death were, first of all, the drug-ridden star
Jeanne Eagels, 1929; Milton Sills, 1930; the young leading man Robert Ames,
1931; dope-addicted Alma Rubens, 1931; the comic, Karl Dane, 1932; silent
star Marie Prevost, 1934; director George Hill, 1934; fallen star John Gilbert,
19353 the star of The Crowd, James Murray, 1937; the young Warner Broth¬
ers leading man, Ross Alexander, 1937; the director Tom Forman, 1938. A
second wave carried off female impersonator Julian Eltinge, 1941; comedian
Joe Jackson, 1942; the comedienne Lupe Velez, 1944; the character actor
Laird Cregar, 1945; Hal Roach star Carole Landis, 1948; Hitchcock’s actor
Robert Walker, 1951; and the Madame Gin Sling of Sternberg, Ona Munson,
1956.
The most recent spectacular attempts have been those of Susan Hayward,
saved by having her stomach pumped out, as well as Diana Barrymore in 1955;
Martha Raye and Judy Garland in the following year, and in 1957 Montgomery
Clift and Marie MacDonald,—known as The Body —a starlet suffering from con¬
stant bad publicity following her famous bungled “kidnaping attempt.”
The palm for perseverance in this department should go to Judy Garland, who
was dropped by M-G-M and who has tried on several occasions to end it all by
Seconal, by gas, or with a razor, in between stays at various withdrawal sanitar¬
iums.
The friend and assistant of Murnau, Herman Bing, put an end to his life by
means of a pistol shot in 1947, as had Paul Bern in 1932 and Robert Harron,
Griffith’ s ex-protege, in 1920.
Also in 1935, the ex-star of silent pictures, Lou Tellegen, staged the most re¬
volting of all Hollywood suicides; surrounded by posters of his successes and his
most beautiful stills, he ripped open his chest with scissors, just like Max Lin¬
der, ten years before.
“There’s no come-back for a HAS BEEN."
The suicide of Lupe Velez is possibly the most revealing and the one giving
the deepest insight. Her hot temperament at all times has earned this comedi¬
enne, introduced by Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho, Leon Errol’s leading lady
in Hal Roach Comedies, the surname of “The Mexican Bombshell.” Famous for
her stormy love affairs, Lupe, upon being deserted by Gary Cooper, got hold
of young Johnny Weissmuller—hero of the Olympic Games and the fastest
swimmer in the world—who had been called to Hollywood to play Tarzan. The
marks of their violent physical encounters left marks on Tarzan’s Olympian torso
which created a problem for the makeup man, who had to camouflage scratches,
bruises and bites—not all of them, of course, only the ones which would show
on film! It should be added that Johnny took spectacular revenge one night at
Ciro’s, the most exclusive nightclub on Sunset Boulevard, by throwing a table—
and everything on it!—at the head of this ravening she-wolf.
When Lupe no longer saw a way out of her troubles—after so many quar-
29 °
Sex and Scandal
rels and stories—she decided to kill herself, and determined to turn it into one
of the most beautiful moments of her life; to turn tragedy into apotheosis.
She ordered hundreds of flower arrangements, and when her house had been
turned into a greenhouse of the very loveliest ones, she called in her make-up
man and her hairdresser to turn her out more magnificently than ever before
for this last time. Then, in the huge Spanish-style house, she put on a lame dress
and lots of j ewelry. Af ter a solitary banquet, during which she had herself served
with the spiced dishes of her native country, she dismissed the servants and went
upstairs to her room. Alone among the flowers, she swallowed a tubeful of Sec¬
onal and lay down on her bed.
Half an hour later, the meticulous staging suddenly took an unforseen turn
which would have been worthy of Bunuel. All the effects planned by the fiery
Mexican had been ordered; the flowers paid her a final homage, the glistening
chandeliers shone on the lame of her dress. Lupe died in beauty.
The harmony was complete, with the sole exception of the Seconal and the
spicy food, when the solemn lights around her body were abruptly bespattered.
Lupe obeyed an instinct even stronger than death and ran, teetering on her high
heels, toward the bathroom. But she slipped on the marble tiles as she ran up
to the toilet bowl—which turned out to be her last mirror!—and head first, she
fell in and broke her neck. Thus she was found, stuck and half-submerged in this
bowl, strange and macabre. And thus was extinguished one of Hollywood’s glo¬
ries!
Parker. Tyler
Parker Tyler was one of the most eclectic and eccentric (fjilm critics, and one of the most
valuable, because although his essays often readlikefree association involving all the movies
he had seen, there was always an underlying logic, detonated at the end of the journey.
By the time we get to the end of this essay about sex goddesses in the movies, we under¬
stand why they are not to be slept with, or on, but about.
Parker Tyler
291
“The Awful Fate of the Sex Goddess”
What, by virtue of the movies, is a sex goddess? It is easy to point, say, to Sophia
Loren, imagine her quite naked (as may be done without the camera’s assistance)
and have the right answer. But Miss Loren’s case is relatively simple and unaf¬
fected. The matter, with regard to the movies’ history of sex, is too complex
for mere pointing. The sex goddess’s mutation, starting with the celebrated
Vampire, is something to arrest and fascinate movie buffs and other susceptible
scholars. Its ups and downs, turnabouts and triumphs, take on cosmic dimen¬
sions. Going in as straight a line as possible from Theda Bara to Greta Garbo,
one’s wits are staggered by so vast a change visible in one stroke of the imagi¬
nation—and that stroke takes us only to 1941. . . . Technically, Garbo is a di¬
rect descendant of her distant Hollywood predecessor: the fatal Queen of Love
and Ruler of Man which a sex goddess is—or was—supposed to be.
I change the tense and there’s the rub. For whatever reasons, a sharp decline
of divine dimensions in nominal sex goddesses has come about; it is as if “sex”
and “goddess” were terms that, idiomatically, no longer agreed. Take the case
of one who bore a notable physical resemblance to Sophia Loren, Jane Russell,
a goddess ephemeral and now long extinct. Miss Russell was two great breasts
mounted upon a human pedestal with a doll’s head to top it off. Besides being
no actress at all (which Loren, after all, is), Russell was hardly a sound recipe
for a sex goddess. Her peculiar weakness may have lain in the very fact that a
California judge, passing on the claim that her film, The Outlaw, was obscene
owing largely to her salient and partly exposed mammary equipment, decided
that anything God-given, such as breasts, could not be “obscene.” Goddesses,
by definition, are beyond the law. But voluptuous breasts are but the window-
dressing of sex divinity. Jane represented one of the last historic efforts to in¬
vent a great personality on the basis of sex-appeal alone.
Plausibly, the physical dimensions of sex goddesses first tended to be ample.
Theda Bara had a maternal figure. She was, in fact, remarkably like a suburban
housewife circa World War I, bitten by the glamor bug into imagining herself
supreme seductress of men, and by some weird turn of fate succeeding at it.
Today, an Elizabeth Taylor also succeeds though her proportions and personal¬
ity start by being those of the reigning office minx, from whom neither presi¬
dent of the company nor errand boy is safe. By another weird turn of fate we
get instead, in this actress, a universal Miss Sexpot—for a sex goddess, one is
obliged to call that a comedown. Nowadays sex-goddessing is more a trade than
something, as it were, acquired by divine privilege. Another Italian star, Gina
Lollobrigida, oddly resembles Miss Taylor although she is better-looking. Lol-
2 9 2
Sex and Scandal
lobrigida is simply Sophia Loren seen a few paces further off: a sort of repro¬
duction in minor scale. But big and beautiful as La Loren is, we must face the
fact that sheer majesty in the female body has become, historically, badly com¬
promised as a glamor asset. Being a sex goddess has nothing whatever to do with
the sexual act as such. Getting laid is a strictly human, quite unglamorous oc¬
cupation.
Mediating between Bara and Garbo, Mae West turned up as an eccentric, ut¬
terly unexpected manifestation of sex divinity. Like the old gods of the Greek
plays, she appeared with the primal authority of“Here I am!” Part of the majesty
of Mae’s corseted figure, hefty of hip and bosom, was its anachronism: she du¬
plicated the physical image of the late 19th century stage, where even chorus
girls were girthy. The very pathos of distance helped make West a goddess, and
historic. 1 confess to having been, in 1944, the first to describe what her style
owed to the female impersonator: just about everything basic. A true parody of
sex divinity, Mae was the opposite of the classic Vampire because she aimed at
being both funny and good-natured: qualities more plebeian than royal or di¬
vine.
The movie canon of the teens and twenties had it that personified sex-appeal
was a destroyer of men. Hence the Vampire embodied irresistible sexual evil.
She was no laughing matter till time gave us the modern perspective, in which
she’s little but that. Vintage eroticism, regally portrayed by beautiful ladies
throughout the twenties, automatically evokes titters when seen today. Mae
West’s sudden greatness was to have introduced a deliberately comic parody of
the sex goddess. Her unique blend of sexiness and vulgar comedy, in other
words, was the screen’s first sterling brand of conscious sex camp. Other brands
developed but these were the cynical farcing of tired-out actresses who had never
quite believed in their own eroticism. Mae did believe in hers. That was the won¬
der of the spectacle she made. Few others actually did—probably not even her
leading men! What her public believed in was the raw, happy camp of it. That
incredible nasality, that incredible accent!
Garbo is virtually unique among the remoter goddesses because, even in some
of her earlier roles (such as that in Romance) , she can still be taken seriously. And
yet even Garbo is not foolproof against the sensibility of what once a very few
called, and now the world calls, camp. (Camp, one must note, is a proved cul¬
ture virus affecting non-deviates as well as deviates.) Seeing Greta gotten up as
an innocent country girl in The Torrent, one understands better that creeping par¬
ody of passion that meant her downfall in Two-Faced Woman, her last picture. The
“two-faced” was painfully exact. A split personality may have suited the being
termed by Robert Graves the Triple Goddess of archaic times on earth. But for
our times, even one extra personality makes The Divine Woman (the title of a
Garbo film) into a schizophrenic with professional delusion-of-grandeur. Film
Parker Tyler
2 93
myths of the making and unmaking of a star began to appear as early as the thir¬
ties and their climax, in the sixties, was explicitly labelled The Goddess —no ac¬
cident that an actress with superficial sex-appeal and no real ability, Kim Novak,
was featured in it.
The sex goddess, supposedly, satisfies a basic human need: she would and
should be the sanctified, superhuman symbol of bedroom pleasure, and bedroom
pleasure as such seems here to stay. Europe, however, held a more tangible ap¬
preciation of sex as sex. Thus, a Brigitte Bardot came as no surprise at all. This
legitimate goddess, after fifteen years’ hard labor, has faded. Yet while she was
at her international peak (somewhat pre-Loren), she had the simplicity and
stark presence natural to erotic greatness. B. B., with canonic plenitude up front,
facile nudity and long, tumbling blonde hair, was an impressive paradox: a
cheerful Magdalene. Repentance and guilt were alien to her if only because her
assets (like Jane Russell’s before her) were so unmistakably God-given. Un¬
worldly innocence imparted to B. B.’s sexiness a gay pathos; worldly sophisti¬
cation imparted to Mae West’s a more complex gaiety, a more complex pathos.
B. B. was a symbol that implied nothing but reality, Mae a reality that implied
nothing but a symbol. . . .
When the self-farcing tendency began overtaking stars and films in the late
fifties and sixties, even bouncy B. B. began parodying her rather down-to-earth
divinity. As of now, screen nudity (to take sex at its simplest) has begun to be
so proliferant as to look common. Arty, self-conscious, coyly denuding camera
shots of the sexual clutch (one has had to creep up on body-candor in the movies)
has become, by 1969, a cliche. Sex goddesses inevitably were victimized by the
big breakthrough toward sexual realism. Currently, we are down to the nitty-
gritty of the postures, the paintings, the in-plain-view of sex—down, in other
words, to its profanity, including the garniture of those four-letter words. The
sex goddesses have become sitting ducks for the exploding peephole of a film
frame. In La Dolce Vita (i960), Fellini’s genius for casting cannily registered the
fatal downwardness then true of sex-goddessing. We found a perfect big-blonde-
goddess type, Anita Ekberg, playing a parody movie star with a bust like a ti-
taness, a baby voice and the courage of Minnie Mouse.
Sexy even so? Well, yes. Fellini pressed some delicate poetry no less than
some satire from the combination of Miss Ekberg’s shape, poundage and sweet,
naive femininity. Yet when, in the film, her husband whacks her for moonlighting
with Mastroianni and she slinks off to bed, La Ekberg is just another silly
woman—and “divine” only as a young man’s midnight fancy. Even when she had
answered in kind to the baying of neighborhood dogs, it was more a chorus than
a command: the gorgeous bitch fled in an auto when the baying became serious.
Fellini thereby branded the explicit profession of sex goddess a benignly comic
fraud. Whyever should sex goddesses have fallen so low as to be “caught out”
294
Sex and Scandal
like that? The way they were caught out is clear enough: their regal posture was
shown as an imposture: a fabricated illusion based on physical pretensions and
almost nothing else. The method was to expose the base fleshly mechanism be¬
hind a grand illusion. In Hollywood, both sex goddesses and other stars were,
it seemed, manufactured. Essentially, the goddesses had been lovely hoaxes
foisted upon a naive, gullible and dated public of both sexes: the gaga identifiers
(female) and the gasping adorers (male).
It is a pause-giving irony that the truly great among sex goddesses were the
first to show glaring symptoms of the decline and fall of the movie line. Was
there something too Jafadelike about the Very Greats? Gazing back, one can de¬
tect one of the handsomest, Nita Naldi (who played opposite Valentino in Blood
and Sand ), unable to be anything from head to foot but a striking mask. In the
teens and early twenties, statuesque feminine fulsomeness was still bona fide; it
was the sweet and pure star actresses who were petite. Today, like Bara, Naldi
must seem a rather puffy anachronism; if not downright absurd, at least strangely
pathetic—a period clotheshorse, stunning but quite without humor. And take
Mae West as a “mask” rather than a comedienne: physically she seems made from
a mold, as if her whole body were a layer of simulated flesh about an inch thick,
with nothing whatever inside. It took wit, humor and an interesting face to make
La West a real “divine woman.”
Historically, humor came into Hollywood supersex with the later twenties
in the personnel of Flaming Youth: chiefly the “It Girl,” Clara Bow. And then,
of course, came Jean Harlow, who created a totally new standard for sex god¬
desses. Jean was a sacred-whore type whose unabashed vulgarity (even as West’s)
was integral with the spell she cast. Yet a few veils of illusion had been brutally
tom off: evidently the sex goddess was no lady if, as Harlow, she could be a
downright slut. Nobody sensed it then, I think, but a great symbol was being
debunked. There could be no question about Harlow’s real fleshliness, all over
and through and through, if only because nothing seemed to exist between her
and her filmy dresses but a little perspiration.
Like Mae, Jean was funny—more professionally and seriously so than Clara
Bow, who was only a rampaging teenager with sex-appeal; essentially, that is,
Clara was decent. Both West and Harlow let a certain middle-class decency (al¬
lied with basic chastity) simply go by the board. Both gloried in being, at least
potentially, unchaste. They weren’t exactly prostitutes (or but rarely) yet that
they exploited sex professionally hit one between the eyes. They were Gimme
Girls as much as Glamor Girls and quite beyond morality in those vocations. It
would be humanly unnatural should beautiful ladies, every bare inch of them,
cease to be darlings of the camera’s eye. But capitalized Lust is either a mad
holiday or a deadly sin. Once, being a sex goddess was to skip all mundane con¬
siderations and assume that Lust meant Glorious Aphrodite. In the movies’ ad-
Parker Tyler
29J
vanced age (they are well over seventy), sex and other sorts of violence keep
the film cameras grinding. But make no mistake: the goddessing of movie sex,
subtly and brutally too, has met an awful fate.
In West, parody was a divine she-clown act; in Harlow, sex bloomed mirac¬
ulously, nakedly, gaudily from the gutter. The Queen, a documentary about
classy transvestites competing for the title of Miss All-American, offers (at the
moment I write) the most eloquent evidence anywhere that sex-goddessing can
still be taken seriously. Yet among those to whom queendom is synonymous with
homosexuality, the divinity of sex as a public symbol carries a necessary irony
and a necessary narrowness. “Harlow” has become a sort of trade name among
professional transvestites. The winner of the contest in The Queen calls himself
just Harlow, and one of Andy Warhol’s home-made films is titled Harlot because
it features an Underground transvestite’s camp act in a blonde wig.
This “superstar,” Mario Montez, has attached the name of a minor sex god¬
dess (extinct) who was lately honored with an Underground cult: Maria Mon¬
tez. The camp symbolism of the Warhol film, whose action takes place entirely
on and about a couch where four people are grouped—two young men, a “les¬
bian” and “Harlow”—is to have Montez extract first one banana then another
from various caches and munch them deliberately, in voluptuous leisure, for
about an hour. This is the principal “action.” Get the picture? If you do, you qual¬
ify for the Underground sex scene. It’s this way: one is to imagine a camp queen
of sex, even when genuinely female, not with an adoring male crawling up her
knees, but an adored male with her crawling up his knees. In her early days, Garbo
herself used to slither over her men like a starved python. But she was only com¬
batting Old Man Morality: her erotic power, and its authenticity, were never
in question.
Today everything is in question about the sex goddess but the blunt mecha¬
nism any woman offers a man. Personally, I find the progressive demoralization
of the s. g. in females rather desperately saddening. T wo acting celebrities, Bette
Davis and Tallulah Bankhead (while neither was ever a sex goddess), have par¬
odied neurotic and unconsciously funny females so of ten and so emphatically that
they represent an historic attack on high feminine seductiveness. Sex-parody be¬
came, rather early, an integral part of Miss Davis’ style till it exploded in her
i oo per cent camp films, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush, Hush, Sweet
Charlotte. The aging Miss Bankhead’s failure as a serious actress was suavely
turned into success on the radio as a bass-voiced caricature. In the movies, fi¬
nally, Bankhead followed suit to Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte with Die, Die, My
Darling (Ugh!). Yet she (a handsome woman in her own right) had once in her
career, if transiently, vied with Garbo.
We find a rich clue to the fate of the sex goddesses if we look at the way clas¬
sic beauty currently serves movie sex. If the physical proportions and personal-
296
Sex and Scandal
ities of Sophia Loren and Anita Ekberg lend themselves easily to light sex-
comedy with a wedge of farce and satire, the face and figure of Ursula Andress
(taken in themselves) have a pure, invulnerable classic beauty. In the 19th cen¬
tury and the first quarter of the 20th, Ursula would have been destined as a sex
goddess of real if removed divinity, surrounded with protocol and awe, a queen
of fashion as of sex. On looks and style alone, Andress would do as well in so¬
ciety as in the acting profession. But what, alas! was her fate? To be an ultra-
classy foil for a James Bond—a lesbianlike Pussy Galore! A “destroyer of men,”
by all means, but stamped with the comicstrip sensibility (see Modesty Blaise, et
al.) that informs all Pop versions of camp sex.
The newest archetype of the sex goddess, robbing her of her former dignity
and classic authority, inhabits the comic strip itself, where Barbarella (played
by Jane Fonda) has been enshrined as the supreme Vinyl Girl of sex-appeal. Fun¬
damentally, she is the oldtime serial queen, rediviva. Remember that serials (take
The Perils of Pauline) were always animated comic strips with real performers.
Even more significantly, there has been the completely nude Phoebe Zeit-Geist,
the comicstrip heroine introduced by the Evergreen Review. Like a metaphys¬
ical idea, Phoebe seemed not to know what clothes are. Her sole function, naked
and attractive as she was, was to be camp sacrificial victim in perpetuo for the
historic villains and most grandiose, come-lately freaks of comicstripdom (for
more clarification on this theme, consult the well-thumbed dictionary of sado¬
masochism at your local library).
Maybe no fate is really awful so long as, like Phoebe’s, it’s also fun. Yet the
point is erotically disputable. To those tending to think the female sex repre¬
sents a supreme power, like antiquity’s Ruler of Men, the latterday Pop ver¬
sions of sex goddesses partake more of existential gloom than existential fun.
The “fun” is slightly sick. Shouldn’t the put-it-on-the-line psychology of sex-
presentation be left for the hardcore geeks in the audience? Actually the trans¬
vestites, with their delusions of reincarnating extinct sex goddesses, are truer
queens of beauty and sex than Ursula Andress—who looks more and more as
if she had been cut out of cardboard and achieved her classic volumes by cour¬
tesy of 3-D (flesh-tones by Technicolor). I, for one, think it an awful fate that
the grand profession of sex-goddessing should have sunk to the petty profession
of sex-shoddessing. The robotizing trend of female charms (against which only
that cartoon pair of Playboy tits seems holding out) must not be underrated.
Think, ladies and gentlemen! The supreme goal of male propulsion, as foreseen
in 2001 : a Space Odyssey, is a geometric black slab with unproved sexual capac¬
ities. Theda Bara would, tacitly, be more negotiable than that; and shapelier.
Come to think of it, Marilyn Monroe came along in those fidgety ’fifties and
altered the whole set-up. There was something genuine about her, and really
pathetic, as if she were all too human to exercise the great craft of queening it
Brendan Gill
297
for the tradition. We know what finally happened to her. Maybe she was the
last “goddess” actually seeming to be made out of flesh rather than foamrubber:
something to sleep with, not on. And that was probably her fatal mistake. God¬
desses are to be slept about.
Brendan Gill
Although the history ojjilmed pornography is almost as long as the history ojjilm, it was
not until the late 1960s, with the advent offilms like I am Curious (Yellow) and Deep
Throat, that porn began to be openly advertised and exhibited in movie theaters. Bren¬
dan Gill, for many years a film critic at The New Yorker and then its theater critic,
described his porn-going experiences in 19"J3 for Film Comment. "1 was known there
as the grey eminence of porn, "he wrote me recently. "As I predicted (I wouldn't mention
this, of course, except that it r fleets credit on me!), what was then thought to be porno¬
graphic moved into the mainstream—when boy and girl meet ‘cute’ nowadays it is often
the case that she is going down on him. And nobody says a word about it. The world is
full of wonders, is it not?”
“Blue Notes”
1
For a good many years, I was a movie reviewer for the New Yorker, and I con¬
tinue to go to movies with an undiminished and evidently incorrigible zeal, which
is to say that I am upset if I fail to see most of the important movies of a given
season and that I feel from time to time a nagging desire not merely to have seen
certain movies but also to be known to have seen them—to put in my two cents’
worth of criticism along with that of my former colleagues. I try to resist this
temptation, but there are areas of moviemaking that my old friends curiously
neglect, and with pleasure I now volunteer to walk the bounds of one such area,
298
Sex and Scandal
calling attention to a few of the more notable features of a landscape appar¬
ently as foreign to most newspaper and magazine reviewers as Cockaigne.
What I have i n mind are those commercial blue movies that have become a com¬
monplace of our contemporary culture and about which, up to now, there has
been an almost total lack of critical discussion. Whenever I raise the question
of the radical changes that have taken place in their manufacture and distribu¬
tion in recent years, it will usually turn out that my friends among the reviewers
have no first-hand knowledge of these changes and that what little they possess
in the way of opinions is based on hearsay. All this for the reason that they sim¬
ply do not go to blue movies, indeed, they are, or affect to be, aggressively in¬
different to them. Sometimes they protest that the reason for their indifference
is that blue movies are so boring. How can they be sure of this, I ask them, if
they refuse to see any? Unhappy at being caught out in a child’s dodge, they offer
a child’s riposte: everyone knows that blue movies are boring, and the only mys¬
tery is what a person of my supposedly refined perceptions finds of interest in
them. With a patience that they no doubt consider irritating, I point out that
they have misconstrued the argument, a sure sign of unease: up to that moment,
I had not claimed that blue movies were interesting in themselves but only that
they could not be ignored as a phenomenon. Lest I be thought to be masking a
Puritan prurience behind sociological cant (one thinks of Bishop Potter leapfrog¬
ging among the whores in order to improve his education), I then quickly add
that a large portion of the blue movies I go to strike me as being at once boring
and fascinating, and that what proves fascinating in them nearly always encour¬
ages me to sit through what proves boring. In that respect, if perhaps in no other,
blue movies are not unlike the works of George Eliot.
II
I go to as many blue movies as I can find time for, and it amounts to a blessing
that two of the most important theatres housing hard-core porn in New York
City—the Hudson/Avon, for heterosexual blue movies, and the Park/Miller,
for homosexual ones—are within a couple of hundred yards of my office. At
the moment of writing, another fifteen or twenty porn houses are but five min¬
utes away. How lucky I am that this unexpected period of permissiveness in
pornography should have coincided with my life, and how unready I am to have
the period brought to a close by some new ruling of the courts! The President’s
Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, appointed by Johnson, submitted
a report to Nixon so little disapproving of pornography and therefore so little
to his liking that Nixon immediately rejected it. Open pornography openly ar¬
rived at has been in increasing jeopardy during the Nixon administration. A per¬
missive society makes people like Nixon nervous, because they feel sure of
Brendan Gill
299
themselves only under conditions of repression. These conditions need not be
the ones they favor; if they exist, they can be manipulated and made to serve.
The threat to freedom of the press and the threat to a continued easy access to
pornography are scarcely to be spoken of in the same breath, but they occupy
the same ground and will often be found to have the same defenders.
Ill
History may see the early nineteen-seventies as the high-water mark of permis¬
siveness in the arts in this country. At present, there is nothing I can think of
that a novel or poem is not free to describe, that a play or dance cannot em¬
body, that a movie cannot depict. We are no longer at the mercy of the Irish
Catholic policeman who stops a movie, arrests the projectionist, and testifies in
court that the movie must have been obscene because it gave him an erection.
(What does that make his wife, who presumably is capable of securing the same
response? Or his sacred old mother, who, if she had lacked this ability, would
have failed to conceive him?) Still, we remain a Jansenist country, in which, as
Henry Adams noted long ago, sex remains a species of crime. The police and
the courts are eager to resume control over our appetites; prosecutors who
should know better continue to equate morality with law. The grating insistence
on the part of clergymen and big real-estate operators that the city clean up Times
Square may be a hint of hard times to come. The Times Square that these groan-
ers pretend to look back upon with affection never existed; it was a squalid and
ramshackle honky-tonk fifty years ago, as it is today, and the groaners were al¬
ready in full—and, thank goodness, ineffectual—voice. The metaphor for the
Square is the statue of Father Duffy there: pigeons shitting on the bronze head
of a priest. The question is not “What are they doing there?” but “What is he
doing there?” I grant that the Square is more dangerous now than it was in the
twenties, but then so is Fifth Avenue, so is Main Street everywhere. The groan¬
ers do not really want the Square to be cleaned up; they want it to be wiped
out. Their cure for what they consider all the uglier manifestations of the life-
force is extermination.
IV
Yeats says that love pitches its mansion in the place of excrement, and this is
precisely what all blue movies, even the worst of them, say again and again; ide¬
ally, it is all they have to say. And I say that we are a timid and fastidious peo¬
ple and are far from having heard the message as often as we need to. But in
saying even that much I risk striking the note of the Puritan bully: the mutilat-
300
Sex and Scandal
ing didact, sure that he knows what is good for everyone else, and who, if he
likes eating dung, would turn us into a nation of dung-eaters.
V
Many otherwise sophisticated men are embarrassed to be seen entering or leav¬
ing a blue movie house. Hard as it is to believe, this sense of shame is surely one
of the reasons that so few of my former colleagues have kept up with the revo¬
lution in the genre. By and large, movie reviewers are a bourgeois lot, and while
they would not be averse to catching a blue movie or two at the home of that
quintessence of bourgeois chic, George Plimpton, they are unwilling to stand
at the turnstiles of the not very fashionable little boutique pomie houses—
former hardware stores, shoe shops, and delicatessens—that bespeckle the West
Forties. They would feel that the eyes of the world were upon them, glittering
with disapprobation. (“Nanny spank!”) Myself, what I usually feel at the turn¬
stiles is a rueful sense of outrage at the price of admission: three or four dollars
at most midtown heterosexual blue movie houses and five dollars at most mid¬
town homosexual houses. In the light of how little the movies have cost to make
compared with, say, ryan’s daughter, I cannot fail to feel that I am being flim-
flammed. Nevertheless, 1 pay, for nevertheless it is worth it. On leaving the the¬
atre, many people dart sidelong into the crowd, seeking to efface themselves
and their immediate past as quickly as possible. My own tendency is to saunter.
Since I have the reputation of being an exceptionally fast walker, my slow pace
under the marquee must be a way of affirming that attendance at blue movies is
not to my mind a clandestine activity. Grubby, yes, it may be that, but I have
long since made my peace with grubbiness. There are a number of things in my
life that I cherish and that lack elegance.
VI
Some titles: The Odd Mother, Little Women, The Coming Thing, Gland Hotel, Cheek
to Cheek, All Balled Up. And in just tribute to that early capital of movie pom, on
every blazing marquee: San Francisco Femmes.
VII
Nowhere in these notes have I tried to define the word “pornography.” And this
is wise and not merely craven, for if two people were to discuss the matter face
Brendan Gill
301
to face it is possible that they could arrive at last at a rough meaning, hedged
round with all manner of provisos concerning its applicability to such and such
a state of affairs in such and such a time and place. Three people, though they
met face to face, would be unlikely to agree on a definition. Pornography is what¬
ever one thinks it is, and what 1 think it is will have to be guessed from the way
I write about it. In his biography of Mark Twain, Justin Kaplan speaks of the
pornography of the dollar. I think I know what the phrase means, but I doubt if
J. Paul Getty would know what it means. Or, rather, to be fair to Mr. Getty
(f or the evidence is clear that he is far more acute about money than I am), if he
were to be right about what the phrase means, then I would be sure to be
wrong. In the same fashion, Pope Paul and I do not mean the same thing when
we speak of the sacredness of the body. To me that means its continuous, joy¬
ous use, in all its passionate carnality; to the Pope it means chastity, the highest
expression of which is virginity, both in men and in women. In short, non-use:
a gathering of cob-webs, to be broken only by the furtive, unruly finger.
VIII
If I am being fair to J. Paul Getty, I may as well try to be fair to the Papacy as
well. Paul’s predecessor, the jolly and sensual John, would have granted me my
definition of the sacredness of the body, only adding that eating and drinking
and working and playing and making love must be to the greater glory of God.
“No harm in that?” he would have asked me, and “No harm in that,” I would
have been obliged to reply. John once granted an audience to a large body of
journalists meeting in Rome. His message to them: “Now, you gentlemen
are journalists, and there is one commandment—‘Thou shalt not bear false wit¬
ness’—that is to be followed with a particular fidelity by you. As for the other
nine, pay as little attention as possible to them.”
IX
A good deal of nonsense has been written about the audiences at blue movies.
As a veteran champion of Women’s Lib, I am sorry to say that the most inac¬
curate articles I have read on the subject have been by women reporters, who
in most cases describe what they expected to find and not what, according to
my greater experience in this field, actually exists. What Dwight Macdonald
has called the parajournalism of Tom Wolfe has infected a younger generation
of writers: in Wolfe’s terms, serendipity is not the happy faculty of stumbling
by chance upon something one wants but the inventing of something one wants
302
Sex and Scandal
that is then stumbled upon by calculation. Writers in the Village Voice and else¬
where would have you believe that audiences at blue movies consist largely of
lonely, middle-aged men bringing themselves off under rustling raincoats. Let
me testify that the pleasure of masturbation appears to be no more commonly
indulged in at blue movies than at straight ones. It could be argued, indeed, that
the rate of indulgence would be likely to be higher at straight movies, on the
grounds that one’s fantasy in respect to a desirable but wholly unattainable sex
object would be far more intense than one’s fantasy in respect to women who
combine an appearance of immediate availability with comparatively little al¬
lure. (In a similar way, the underwear advertisements in the Sunday Times
magazine section may be more stimulating to many men and women than the
photographs of genitalia in the magazines sold in the shabby storefronts on
Forty-second Street.) Nor does the average audience consist of middle-aged
men—the range in age will extend from, say, very young, non-English-speaking
Argentinian sailors, who are spending a few days in port and can think of
nothing better to do at the moment, to very old men, who also have nothing
better to do and who tend to fall asleep almost as soon as they sit down, hyp¬
notized not by what they see on the screen but by its harsh light. As for the lone¬
liness of the men in the audience, that is surely in the mind of the beholder; if
it is not, then I am at a loss to understand the method by which, in a darkened
auditorium, a reporter succeeds in detecting such a characteristic. Loneliness
is something I am unable to make out with any degree of confidence in the faces
of strangers passing me on a sunlit Madison Avenue, to say nothing of the faces
of old friends passing me in the corridor outside my office. My guess is that the
audiences at blue movies would be scarcely different in appearance, aptitudes,
and appetites from the male portion of any crowd in a subway car or a politi¬
cal rally or a meeting of the P.T. A. I suspect, but cannot be sure, that many of
the audience are salesmen idling between appointments; others—those who,
glancing at their watches around five in the afternoon, hastily jump to their feet
and race up the aisle—may be commuters, on their way home to voluptuous
wives in Scarsdale.
X
What all reporters can agree on is that the great majority of the audiences at blue
movies is male. White middle-class women of any age are conspicuously absent.
Only one white woman of my acquaintance—a brilliant Englishwoman of
twenty-seven—has seen as many as three or four blue movies. “They make me
feel sexy,” she says. “I was very strictly brought up, so the feeling may come as
much from my sense of doing a forbidden thing as from watching sex. I go to
skinflicks with a man from the office—married; no big deal—to kill a couple
Brendan Gill
3°3
of hours at lunchtime. We bring hot dogs and cokes and relax. I like everything
about skinflicks except the way the man always has to ejaculate outside the
woman. I suppose that’s to prove he isn’t cheating the audience. Naturally, I
think of him as cheating the woman.”
XI
A good many Puerto Ricans and blacks come in couples to blue movies, nearly
always seating themselves at the rear of the theatre and appearing more inter¬
ested in nuzzling each other than in watching the screen. At homosexual blue
movies one sees, understandably, no women at all. As far as I know, there is not
a single blue movie theatre in New York that caters to Lesbians; they must make
do with the occasional movie of women having intercourse that one encounters
in programs combining six or eight so-called “featurettes” or “stagette loops.”
Even in these movies, the two or more women making love will sooner or later
be joined by two or more men, and a heterosexual frolic will then ensue. (In
such cases, the men never make love to other men; it is a tradition in blue movies
that women are permitted to be indiscriminate in regard to the sex of their part¬
ners but that men are not.) Women play no part in homosexual blue movies;
one might expect them to be introduced into a plot as possible rivals or as sex¬
ual objects to be repudiated, but no—the only authentic feminine note struck
is by drag-queens. A large portion of the audience at both heterosexual and ho¬
mosexual blue movies is Oriental. Unlike white males, Oriental males come into
the theatre by two’s and three’s and talk and laugh freely throughout the course
of the program. At heterosexual blue movies, white males ordinarily enter and
leave alone, speak to no one, and manifest as little emotion as possible. If some
especially gauche sexual gesture is enacted on screen, there may be scattered
laughter, almost instantly suppressed; and sometimes, as when an ardent act of
fellatio fails to have the desired result and the fellator increases her efforts with
evident impatience and a speed of thrusting that seems to threaten actual injury,
a universal groan will go up. Otherwise, the conventional posture of the audi¬
ence is that of the herd: calculatedly impassive, taking everything in with fixed
eyes and giving nothing back.
XII
The behavior of audiences at homosexual blue movies is radically unlike that of
audiences at heterosexual ones. Each kind of audience has its favorite rituals and
taboos, and although it is a topic risky to speculate on, it would seem to be the
case that the homosexual audience, enjoying a much greater freedom of action
3°4
Sex and Scandal
than the heterosexual audience, is likely to be having a much better time. For
the homosexual, it is the accepted thing that the theatre is there to be cruised
in; this is one of the advantages he has purchased with his expensive ticket of ad¬
mission. The atmosphere is perhaps not quite that of a tea-dance on a terrace in
the Hamptons, but neither is it that of the Meditation Room at Frank Camp¬
bell’s. Far from sitting slumped motionless in one’s chair, one moves about at
will, sizing up possibilities. Often there will be found standing at the back of the
theatre two or three young men, any of whom, for a fee, will accompany one
to seats well down front and there practice upon one the same arts that are being
practiced upon others on screen. One is thus enabled to enjoy two very differ¬
ent sorts of sexual pleasure simultaneously—a boon that Edison, though him¬
self of strongly homosexual tendencies (one remembers those camping trips with
Henry Ford), was too inhibited to have made his goal when he set about inventing
a practicable motion-picture camera.
XIII
It is a sign of the increasing acceptance of blue movies in our culture that Vari¬
ety now lists the most successful of them in its weekly chart of big movie grossers.
Throughout the autumn, Deep Throat was averaging something like $ 35,000 a
week at the box-office, giving it a place of importance not far below Whats Up
Doc and The Straw Dogs. Legman’s now widely accepted theory that Americans,
in their arts as in their lives, prefer violence to sex, is borne out by the fact that
there has yet to be a really substantial box-office hit among blue movies. The
figures speak for themselves; in the time that it took Deep Throat to gross
$ 500 , 000 , The Godfather grossed $ 42 , 000 , 000 . Deep Throat is a silly little fable
celebrating life; The Godfather is a celebration of blood and death.
XIV
Another sign of a general acceptance of blue movies is the number o flipper East
Side people who are venturing into Times Square to catch blue movies often at
what they believe to be the risk of their lives. A ticket-seller in the box-office
at the Cameo was quoted recently as saying, “We’re getting an altogether dif¬
ferent class of people in here these days—the kind of people who call up and
ask what time the feature starts.”
Brendan Gill
3 °J
XV
As blue movies gain in popularity, they become more and more profitable to
manufacture and distribute. Already they are claiming attention as a growth in¬
dustry, like mobile homes and male cosmetics. In a fashion often praised by big
business but rarely practiced by it, the money to be made in blue movies has led
to increased competition in the marketplace, which has led in turn to a notable
improvement in the quality of the product. Of course I do not mean an im¬
provement in its artistic quality. On the contrary, I would be tempted to argue
that, following the principle that it is the difficulty of the sonnet that makes for
excellence in that form, the present license to depict anything one pleases on
the screen has led to a falling off in the ingenuity of the plots of blue movies—
never a strong point in the best of circumstances—therefore to a lessening of
sympathetic interest on the part of the spectator. In the old Mrs. Grundy days,
one had to find some means, however clumsy, to get the performers down to
their skins, in order that they could set about making love or at least—and how
sad this always seemed!—to simulate making love, with the man’s shadowy gen¬
italia just out of camera range and the girl’s tongue licking her lips in transports
of passion that she was all too evidently far from feeling. We had time to be¬
come familiar with the amateur actors, squeaking away uneasily in their poor
little paper-thin roles, and even to identify with their often grotesque problems.
We wanted them to be happy, which is to say that we wanted them to score,
and we knew that sooner or later they would be able to do so. Nowadays, the
protagonists are often to be seen scoring as the movie opens, and scoring in gi¬
gantic close-ups of great technical resourcefulness, well-lighted and (to the ex¬
tent that scoring is subject to instruction) well-directed, and at the same time
hard to recognize as human. For the camerawork may well be so superb that at
first we will simply not know where we are—can we be approaching the nave
of some great Gothic cathedral, hung with pink moss, or is this only a vagina?
That immense veined wet redwood, straining to resist the force of some incal¬
culable gale—is it only, at second glance, a penis? A few years ago, we would
not have thought “only” a vagina, “only” a penis. The bolder the movie and the
better made it is, the more it risks, in 197 2, boring us. The threat of anti-climax
hovers over the latest and most skilled handiwork of young blue movie makers,
prompting us to observe that in the field of pornography, as in so many other
fields, prosperity is often the enemy of promise.
306
Sex and Scandal
XVI
Simply as theatre, cunnilingus isn’t a patch on fellatio, and it is difficult to see
what even the most ardent Women’s Lib maker of blue movies can do about it.
XVII
People like me, who champion pornography on the grounds that it is life-
enhancing are constantly being told that it isn’t truly life-enhancing, because it
is only a travesty of the real thing. The difficulty with that argument is know¬
ing what the real thing is. Wherever I ask for a definition, my interlocutor be¬
gins to sputter; precisely as “everyone” knows that blue movies are boring,
“everyone” knows what the real thing is. But I don’t. Or I do and I don’t. I live
bathed in a continuous erotic glow, and I recognize pornography as among the
thousand blessed things that heighten this glow. Like sunlight, like water, like
the smell and taste of skin, it helps make me happy. I foresee that with every
passing year it will become increasingly precious to me: a vade mecum when
the adventure of old age begins.
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was thefilm critic of The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, and during
those years hers were the most read, most quoted, most influentialfilm reviews in the world.
Although her outspoken opinions were known much earlier to the readers of the film
magazines and literary quarterlies, shefirst found a larger audience in 1965, with the
publication of herfirst book, I Lost It at the Movies. Even her titles announced her ir¬
reverence. "Is There a Cure for Film Criticism?” she asked, and went on to answer in an
outpouring of words, collected in fourteen books that represent the most important sus¬
tained contribution in the history offilm criticism. It was that word "movies” in the title
of herfirst book that announced her basic orientation: She went to movies, notfilms, and
she scorned abstract theory as a barrier between the moviegoer and the actual experience
of losing it at the movies. Kael’s support of the films and directors she loved led to direct
Pauline Ka el
3°7
involvement: She campaigned; she plotted; she enlisted support from other critics. Less pub¬
lic is her generosity toward younger critics. As one of many novices who learnedfrom Kael
and benefited from her friendship, I was moved to learn that she was still offering en-
coura gement toyoun g writers in 199$, four years after Parkinson’s disease had forced her
to retire from The New Yorker. A teenagefilm critic in Florida wrote me that he’d sent
Kael a sampling of his work. Her health made it difficult for her to write back — so, he
said, she phoned him. Kael’s writings include many pieces that have become famous, in¬
cluding her review of Nashville, her piece on Cary Grant, and her essay ‘Trash, Art and
the Movies. ’’None caused a greater stir than her rave review for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last
Tango in Paris (1992), which I’m pairing with Norman Mailer’s equally personal as¬
sessment of the same movie.
“Last Tango in Paris”
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris was presented for the first time on the
closing night of the New Y ork Film Festival, October 14, 1972; that date should
become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night
Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history. There was no riot,
and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it’s fair to say that the au¬
dience was in a state of shock, because Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of
hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same thrust¬
ing, jabbing eroticism. The movie breakthrough has finally come. Exploitation
films have been supplying mechanized sex—sex as physical stimulant but with¬
out any passion or emotional violence. The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses
the characters’ drives. Marlon Brando, as Paul, is working out his aggression on
Jeanne (Maria Schneider), and the physical menace of sexuality that is emo¬
tionally charged is such a departure from everything we’ve come to expect at
the movies that there was something almost like fear in the atmosphere of the
party in the lobby that followed the screening. Carried along by the sustained
excitement of the movie, the audience had given Bertolucci an ovation, but af¬
terward, as individuals, they were quiet. This must be the most powerfully erotic
movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made,
and so it’s probably only natural that an audience, anticipating a voluptuous feast
from the man who made The Conformist, and confronted with this unexpected
sexuality and the new realism it requires of the actors, should go into shock.
Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared
for that?
Many of us had expected eroticism to come to the movies, and some of us
308
Sex and Scandal
had even guessed that it might come from Bertolucci, because he seemed to have
the elegance and the richness and the sensuality to make lushly erotic movies.
But I think those of us who had speculated about erotic movies had tended to
think of them in terms of Terry Southern’s deliriously comic novel on the sub¬
ject, Blue Movie; we had expected artistic blue movies, talented directors taking
over from the Shlockmeisters and making sophisticated voyeuristic fantasies that
would be gorgeous fun—a real tum-on. What nobody had talked about was a
sex film that would churn up everybody’s emotions. Bertolucci shows his mas¬
terly elegance in Last Tango in Paris, but he also reveals a master’s substance.
The script (which Bertolucci wrote with Franco Arcalli) is in French and Eng¬
lish; it centers on a man’s attempt to separate sex from everything else. When
his wife commits suicide, Paul, an American living in Paris, tries to get away
from his life. He goes to look at an empty flat and meets Jeanne, who is also
looking at it. They have sex in an empty room, without knowing anything about
each other—not even first names. He rents the flat, and for three days they meet
there. She wants to know who he is, but he insists that sex is all that matters.
We see both of them (as they don’t see each other) in their normal lives—Paul
back at the flophouse-hotel his wife owned, Jeanne with her mother, the widow
of a colonel, and with her adoring fiance (Jean-Pierre Leaud), a TV director,
who is relentlessly shooting a sixteen-millimeter film about her, a film that is to
end in a week with their wedding. Mostly, we see Paul and Jeanne together in
the flat as they act out his fantasy of ignorant armies clashing by night, and it is
warfare—sexual aggression and retreat and battles joined.
The necessity for isolation from the world is, of course, his, not hers. But his
life floods in. He brings into this isolation chamber his sexual anger, his glory¬
ing in his prowess, and his need to debase her and himself. He demands total
subservience to his sexual wishes; this enslavement is for him the sexual truth,
the real thing, sex without phoniness. And she is so erotically sensitized by the
rounds of lovemaking that she believes him. He goads her and tests her until when
he asks if she’s ready to eat vomit as a proof of love, she is, and gratefully. He
plays out the American male tough-guy sex role—insisting on his power in bed,
because that is all the “truth” he knows.
What they go through together in their pressure cooker is an intensified,
speeded-up history of the sex relationships of the dominating men and the ador¬
ing women who have provided the key sex model of the past f ew decades—the
model that is collapsing. They don’t know each other, but their sex isn’t “prim¬
itive” or “pure”; Paul is the same old Paul, and Jeanne, we gradually see, is also
Jeanne, the colonel’s daughter. They bring their cultural hangups into sex, so
it’s the same poisoned sex Strindberg wrote about: a battle of unequally matched
partners, asserting whatever dominance they can, seizing any advantage. Inside
the flat, his male physical strength and the mythology he has built on it are the
Pauline KaeI
3°9
primary facts. He pushes his morose, romantic insanity to its limits; he burns
through the sickness that his wife’s suicide has brought on—the self-doubts, the
need to prove himself and torment himself. After three days, his wife is laid out
for burial, and he is ready to resume his identity. He gives up the flat: he wants
to live normally again, and he wants to love Jeanne as a person. But Paul is forty-
five, Jeanne is twenty. She lends herself to an orgiastic madness, shares it, and
then tries to shake it off—as many another woman has, after a night or a twenty
years’ night. When they meet in the outside world, Jeanne sees Paul as a washed-
up middle-aged man—a man who runs a flophouse.
Much of the movie is American in spirit. Brando’s Paul (a former actor and
journalist who has been living off his French wife) is like a drunk with a literary
turn of mind. He bellows his contempt for hypocrisies and orthodoxies; he keeps
trying to shove them all back down other people’s throats. His profane humor
and self-loathing self-centeredness and street “wisdom” are in the style of the
American hardboiled fiction aimed at the masculine-fantasy market, sometimes
by writers (often good ones, too) who believe in more than a little of it.
Bertolucci has a remarkably unbiased intelligence. Part of the convulsive effect
of Last Tango in Paris is that we are drawn to Paul’s view of society and yet we
can’t help seeing him as a self-dramatizing, self-pitying clown. Paul believes that
his animal noises are more honest than words, and that his obscene vision of
things is the way things really are; he’s often convincing. After Paul and Jeanne
have left the flat, he chases her and persuades her to have a drink at a ballroom
holding a tango contest. When we see him drunkenly sprawling on the floor
among the bitch-chic mannequin-dancers and then baring his bottom to the
woman official who asks him to leave, our mixed emotions may be like those
some of us experienced when we watched Norman Mailer put himself in an in¬
defensible position against Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show, justifying all
the people who were fed up with him. Brando’s Paul carries a yoke of mascu¬
line pride and aggression across his broad back; he’s weighed down by it and
hung on it. When Paul is on all fours barking like a crazy man-dog to scare off
a Bible salesman who has come to the flat,* he may—to the few who saw
Mailer’s Wild 90 —be highly reminiscent of Mailer on his hands and knees bark¬
ing at a German shepherd to provoke it. But Brando’s barking extends the terms
of his character and the movie, while we are disgusted with Mailer for needing
to prove himself by teasing an unwilling accomplice, and his barking throws us
outside the terms of his movie.
Realism with the terror of actual experience still alive on the screen—that’s
what Bertolucci and Brando achieve. It’s what Mailer has been trying to get at
in his disastrous, ruinously expensive films. He was right about what was needed
♦Thissccne was deleted by the director after the New York Film Festival showing.
i 1 °
Sex and Scandal
but hopelessly wrong in how he went about getting it. He tried to pull a new
realism out of himself onto film, without a script, depending wholly on impro¬
visation, and he sought to bypass the self-consciousness and fakery of a man act¬
ing himself by improvising within a fictional construct—as a gangster in Wild
90, as an Irish cop in Beyond the Law (the best of them), and as a famous direc¬
tor who is also a possible Presidential candidate in Maidstone. In movies, Mailer
tried to will a work of art into existence without going through the steps of mak¬
ing it, and his theory of film, a rationale for this willing, sounds plausible until
you see the movies, which are like Mailer’s shambling bouts of public misbe¬
havior, such as that Cavett show. His movies trusted to inspiration and were
stranded when it didn’t come. Bertolucci builds a structure that supports im¬
provisation. Everything is prepared, but everything is subject to change, and the
whole film is alive with a sense of discovery. Bertolucci builds the characters “on
what the actors are in themselves. I never ask them to interpret something
preexistent, except for dialogue—and even that changes a lot.” For Bertolucci,
the actors “make the characters.” And Brando knows how to improvise: it isn’t
just Brando improvising, it’s Brando improvising as Paul. This is certainly sim¬
ilar to what Mailer was trying to do as the gangster and the cop and the movie
director, but when Mailer improvises, he expresses only a bit of himself. When
Brando improvises within Bertolucci’s structure, his full art is realized. His per¬
formance is not like Mailer’s acting but like Mailer’s best writing: intuitive, rapt,
princely. On the screen, Brando is our genius as Mailer is our genius in litera¬
ture. Paul is Rojack’s expatriate-failure brother, and Brando goes all the way
with him.
We all know that movie actors of ten merge with their roles in a way that stage
actors don’t, quite, but Brando did it even on the stage. I was in New York when
he played his famous small role in Truckline Cafe in 1946; arriving late at a per¬
formance, and seated in the center of the second row, I looked up and saw what
I thought was an act or having a seizure onstage. Embarrassed for him, I lowered
my eyes, and it wasn’t until the young man who’d brought me grabbed my arm
and said “Watch this guy!” that I realized he was acting. I think a lot of people
will make my old mistake when they see Brando’s performance as Paul; I think
some may prefer to make this mistake, so they won't have to recognize how deep
down he goes and what he dredges up. Expressing a character’s sexuality makes
new demands on an actor, and Brando has no trick accent to play with this time,
and no putty on his face. It’s perfectly apparent that the role was conceived for
Brando, using elements of his past as integral parts of the character. Bertolucci
wasn’t surprised by what Brando did; he was ready to use what Brando brought
to the role. And when Brando is a full creative presence on the screen, the re¬
alism transcends the simulated actuality of any known style of cinema verite, be¬
cause his surface accuracy expresses what’s going on underneath. He’s an actor:
Pauline K a e 1
3 11
when he shows you something, he lets you know what it means. The torture of
seeing Brando—at his worst—in A Countessfrom Hong Kong was that it was a re-
ductio ad absuidum of the wastefulness and emasculation (for both sexes) of Hol¬
lywood acting; Chaplin, the director, obviously allowed no participation, and
Brando was like a miserably obedient soldier going through drill. When you’re
nothing but an inductee, you have no choice. The excitement of Brando’s per¬
formance here is in the revelation of how creative screen acting can be. At the
simplest level, Brando, by his inflections and rhythms, the right American ob¬
scenities, and perhaps an improvised monologue, makes the dialogue his own
and makes Paul an authentic American abroad, in a way that an Italian writer-
director simply couldn’t do withoutthe actor’s help. At a more complex level,
he helps Bertolucci discover the movie in the process of shooting it, and that’s
what makes moviemaking an art. What Mailer never understood was that his
macho thing prevented flexibility and that in terms of his own personality he
couldn’t improvise—he was consciously acting. And he couldn’t allow others to
improvise, because he was always challenging them to come up with something.
Using the tactics he himself compared to “a commando raid on the nature of re¬
ality,” he was putting a gun to their heads. Lacking the background of a direc¬
tor, he reduced the art of film to the one element of acting, and in his confu¬
sion of “existential” acting with improvisation he expected “danger” to be a
spur. But acting involves the joy of self-discovery, and to improvise, as actors
mean it, is the most instinctive, creative part of acting—to bring out and give
form to what you didn’t know you had in you; it’s the surprise, the “magic” in
acting. A director has to be supportive for an actor to feel both secure enough
and free enough to reach into himself. Brando here, always listening to an inner
voice, must have a direct pipeline to the mystery of character.
Bertolucci has an extravagant gift for sequences that are like arias, and he has
given Brando some scenes that really sing. In one, Paul visits his dead wife’s lover
(Massimo Girotti), who also lives in the run-down hotel, and the two men, in
identical bathrobes (gifts from the dead woman), sit side by side and talk. The
scene is miraculously basic—a primal scene that has just been discovered. In an¬
other, Brando rages at his dead wife, laid out in a bed of flowers, and then, in
an excess of tenderness, tries to wipe away the cosmetic mask that defaces her.
He hasbecome the least fussy actor. There is nothing extra, no flourishes in these
scenes. He purifies the characterization beyond all that: he brings the character
a unity of soul. Paul feels so “real” and the character is brought so close that a
new dimension in screen acting has been reached. I think that if the actor were
anyone but Brando many of us would lower our eyes in confusion.
His first sex act has a boldness that had the audience gasping, and the gasp
was caused—in part—by our awareness that this was Marlon Brando doing it,
notan unknown actor. In the flat, he wears the white T-shirt of Stanley Kowal-
ji2 Sex and Scandal
ski, and he still has the big shoulders and thick-muscled arms. Photographed look¬
ing down, he is still tender and poetic; photographed looking up, he is ravaged,
like the man in the Francis Bacon painting under the film’s opening titles. We
are watching Brando throughout this movie, with all the feedback that that im¬
plies, and his willingness to run the full course with a study of the aggression in
masculine sexuality and how the physical strength of men lends credence to the
insanity that grows out of it gives the film a larger, tragic dignity. If Brando knows
this hell, why should we pretend we don’t?
The colors in this movie are late-aftemoon orange-beige-browns and pink—
the pink of flesh drained of blood, corpse pink. They are so delicately modu¬
lated (Vittorio Storaro was the cinematographer, as he was on The Conformist )
that romance and rot are one; the lyric extravagance of the music (by Gato Bar-
bieri) heightens this effect. Outside the flat, the gray buildings and the noise are
certainly modem Paris, and yet the city seems muted. Bertolucci uses a feed¬
back of his own—the feedback of old movies to enrich the imagery and associ¬
ations. In substance, this is his most American film, yet the shadow of Michel
Simon seems to hover over Brando, and the ambience is a tribute to the early
crime-of-passion films of Jean Renoir, especially La Chienne and La Bete Humaine.
Leaud, as T om, the young director, is used as an affectionate takeoff on Godard,
and the movie that Tom is shooting about Jeanne, his runaway bride, echoes Jean
Vigo’s L’Atalante. Bertolucci’s soft focus recalls the thirties films, with their lyri¬
cally kind eye for every variety of passion; Marcel Came comes to mind, as well
as the masters who influenced Bertolucci’s technique—von Sternberg (the con¬
trolled lighting) and Max Ophuls (the tracking camera). The film is utterly
beautiful to look at. The virtuosity of Bertolucci’s gliding camera style is such
that he can show you the hype of the tango-contest scene (with its own echo
of The Conformist ) by stylizing it (the automaton-dancers do wildly fake head
turns) and still make it work. He uses the other actors for their associations,
too—Girotti, of course, the star of so many Italian films, including Senso and
Ossessione, Visconti’s version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, and, as Paul’s
mother-in-law, Maria Michi, the young girl who betrays her lover in Open City.
As a maid in the hotel (part of a weak, diversionary subplot that is soon dispensed
with), Catherine Allegret, with her heart-shaped mouth in a full, childishly
beautiful face, is an aching, sweet reminder of her mother, Simone Signoret, in
her Casque d’Or days. Bertolucci draws upon the movie background of this movie
because movies are as active in him as direct experience—perhaps more active,
since they may color everything else. Movies are a past we share, and, whether
we recognize them or not, the copious associations are at work in the film and
we feel them. As Jeanne, Maria Schneider, who has never had a major role be¬
fore, is like a bouquet of Renoir’s screen heroines and his father’s models. She
carries the whole history of movie passion in her long legs and baby face.
Pauline K ae1
3 1 3
Maria Schneider’s freshness—Jeanne’s ingenuous corrupt innocence—gives
the film a special radiance. When she lifts her wedding dress to her waist, smil¬
ing coquettishly as she exposes her pubic hair, she’s in a great film tradition of
irresistibly naughty girls. She has a movie face—open to the camera, and yet no
more concerned about it than a plant or a kitten. When she speaks in English,
she sounds like Leslie Caron in An American in Paris, and she often looks like a
plump-cheeked Jane Fonda in her Barbarella days. The role is said to have been
conceived for Dominique Sanda, who couldn’t play it, because she was preg¬
nant, but surely it has been reconceived. With Sanda, a tigress, this sexual bat¬
tle might have ended in a draw. But the pliable, softly unprincipled Jeanne of
Maria Schneider must be the winner: it is the soft ones who defeat men and walk
away, consciencelessly. A Strindberg heroine would still be in that flat, battling,
or in another flat, battling. But Jeanne is like the adorably sensual bitch-heroines
of French films of the twenties and thirties—both shallow and wise. These girls
know how to take care of themselves; they know who No. i is. Brando’s Paul,
the essentially nai've outsider, the romantic, is no match for a French bourgeois
girl.
Because of legal technicalities, the film must open in Italy before it opens in
this country, and so Last Tango in Paris is not scheduled to play here until Janu¬
ary. There are certain to be detractors, for this movie represents too much of a
change for people to accept it easily or gracefully. They’ll grab at aesthetic
flaws—a florid speech or an oddball scene—in order to dismiss it. Though
Americans seem to have lost the capacity for being scandalized, and the Festi¬
val audience has probably lost the cultural confidence to admit to being scan¬
dalized, it might ha ve been easier on some if they could have thrown things. I ’ ve
tried to describe the impact of a film that has made the strongest impression on
me in almost twenty years of reviewing. This is a movie people will be arguing
about, I think, for as long as there are movies. They’ll argue about how it is in¬
tended, as they argue again now about The Dance of Death. It is a movie you can’t
get out of your system, and 1 think it will make some people very angry and dis¬
gust others. I don’t believe that there’s anyone whose feelings can be totally re¬
solved about the sex scenes and the social attitudes in this film. For the very
young, it could be as antipathetic as L'Avventura was at first—more so, because
it’s closer, more realistic, and more emotionally violent. It could embarrass
them, and even frighten them. For adults, it’s like seeing pieces of your life, and
so, of course, you can’t resolve your feelings about it—our feelings about life
are never resolved. Besides, the biology that is the basis of the “tango” remains.
3 14
Sex and Scandal
Nokman Mailer.
"One might as well be in the crowd just before an important fight commences" — Mailer’s
high praise before the lights go downfor Last Tango in Paris. And then comes his dis¬
appointment at the lack of gynecological detail; Mailer, like so many bfore and since,
awaits the cinematic marriage of Sex and Art. I am not convinced such a thing is possi¬
ble. In traditionalfiction films, art involves the filmmakers in creating a fiction about
characters whose lives we care about. Sex, to the degree that it involves nudity and ex¬
plicit detail, brings the whole story crashing down to the level of documentary. The ac¬
tors lose not only their clothes but their characters, and stand (or recline) revealed as only
themselves.
“Tango, Last Tango”
To pay one ’ s $ j. o o and join the full house at the Translux f or the evening show
of Last Tango in Paris is to be reminded once again that the planet is in a state of
pullulation. The seasons accelerate. The snow which was falling in November
had left by the first of March. Would our summer arrive at Easter and end with
July? It is all that nuclear radiation, says every aficionado of the occult. And we
pullulate. Like an ant-hive beginning to feel the heat.
We know that Spengler’s thousand-year metamorphosis from Culture to
Civilization is gone, way gone, and the century required for a minor art to move
from commencement to decadence is off the board. Whole fashions in film are
bom, thrive, and die in twenty-four months. Still! It is only a half year since
Pauline Kael declared to the readers of The New Yorker that the presentation of
Last Tango in Paris at the New York Film Festival on October 14, 1972, was a
date that “should become a landmark in movie history—comparable to May 29,
1913—the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed—in music history,”
and then went on to explain that the newer work had “the same kind of hyp-
Norman Mailer jij
notic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same jabbing,
thrusting eroticism. . . . Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art
form.” Whatever could have been shown on screen to make Kael pop open for
a film? “This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may
turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made. . . .’’Could this be our own
Lady Vinegar, our quintessential cruet? The first frigid of the film critics was
treating us to her first public reception. Prophets of Baal, praise Kael! We had
obviously no ordinary hour of cinema to contemplate.
No w, a half year later, the movie is history, has all the palpability of the historic.
Something just discernible has already happened to humankind as a result of it,
or at least to that audience who are coming in to the Translux to see it. They
are a crew. They have unexpected homogeneity for a movie audience, compose,
indeed, so thin a sociological slice of the New York and suburban sausage that
you cannot be sure your own ticket isn’t what was left for the toothpick, while
the rest of the house has been bought at a bite. At the least, there is the same
sense of aesthetic oppression one feels at a play when the house is filled with a
theater party. So, too, is the audience at Tango an infarct of middle-class anal
majesties—if Freud hadn’t given us the clue, a reader of faces could decide all
on his own that there had to be some social connection between sex, shit,
power, violence, and money. But these middle-class faces have advanced their
historical inch from the last time one has seen them. They are this much closer
now to late Romans.
Whether matrons or young matrons, men or boys, they are swingers. The
males have wife-swapper mustaches, the women are department-store boutique.
It is as if everything recently and incongruously idealistic in the middle class has
been used up in the years of resistance to the Vietnamese War—now, bring on
the Caribbean. Amazing! In America, even the Jews have come to look like the
French middle class, which is to say that the egocentricity of the Fascist mouth
is on the national face. Perhaps it is the five-dollar admission, but this audience
has an obvious obsession with sex as the confirmed core of a wealthy life. It is
enough to make one ashamed of one’s own obsession (although where would
one delineate the difference?). Maybe it is that this audience, still in March, is
suntanned, or at the least made up to look suntanned. The red and orange of
their skins will match the famous “all uterine” colors—so termed by the set de¬
signer—of the interiors in Last Tango.
In the minute before the theater lights are down, what a tension is in the house.
One might as well be in the crowd just before an important fight commences.
3 i6
Sex and Scandal
It is years since one has watched a movie begin with such anticipation. And the
tension holds as the projection starts. We see Brando and Schneider pass each
other in the street. Since we have all been informed—by Time no less—we know
they are going to take carnal occupation of each other, and very soon. The au¬
dience watches with anxiety as if it is also going to be in the act with someone
new, and the heart (and for some, the bowels) shows a tremor between earth¬
quake and expectation. Maria Schneider is so sexual a presence. None of the
photographs has prepared anybody for this. Rare actresses, just a few, have flesh
appeal. You feel as if you can touch them on the screen. Schneider has nose ap¬
peal—you can smell her. She is every eighteen-year-old in a mini-skirt and a
maxi-coat who ever promenaded down Fifth Avenue in the inner arrogance that
proclaims, “My cunt is my chariot.”
We have no more than a few minutes to wait. She goes to look at an apart¬
ment for rent, Brando is already there. They have passed in the street, and by a
telephone booth; now they are in an empty room. Abruptly Brando cashes the
check Stanley Kowalski wrote for us twenty-five years ago—he fucks the hero¬
ine standing up. It solves the old snicker of how do you do it in a telephone
booth?—he rips her panties open. In our new line of New Yorker —approved su¬
perlatives, it can be said that the cry of the fabric is the most thrilling sound to
be heard in World Culture since the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.*
It is, in fact, a hell of a sound, small, but as precise as the flash of a match above
a pile of combustibles, a way for the director to say, “As you may already have
guessed from the way I established my opening, I am very good at movie mak¬
ing, and I have a superb pair, Brando and Schneider—they are sexual heavy¬
weights. Now I place my director’s promise upon the material: you are going
to be in for a grave and wondrous experience. We are going to get to the bot¬
tom of a man and a woman.”
So intimates Bertolucci across the silence of that room, as Brando and Schnei¬
der, fully dressed, lurch, grab, connect, hump, scream, and are done in less than
a minute, their orgasms coming on top of one another like trash cans tumbling
down a hill. They fall to the floor, and fall apart. It is as if a hand grenade has
gone off in their entrails. A marvelous scene, good as a passionate kiss in real
life, then not so good because there has been no shot of Brando going up Schnei¬
der, and since the audience has been watching in all the somber awe one would
bring to the first row of a medical theater, it is like seeing an operation without
the entrance of the surgeon’s knife.
One can go to any hard-core film and see fifty phalluses going in and out of
♦John Simon, as predictable in his critical reactions as a headwaiter, naturally thought Last Tango was part of the
rifT-rafT. Since it is Simon’s temper to ignore details, he not only does not hear the panties tearing (some ears re¬
side in the music of the spheres) but announces that Schneider, beasty abomination, is wearing none.
Norman Mailer
3i7
as many vaginas in four hours (if anyone can be found who stayed four hours).
There is a monumental abstractedness abouthard core. It is as if the more a player
can function sexually bef ore a camera, the less he is capable of offering any other
expression. Finally, the sexual organs show more character than the actors’ faces.
One can read something of the working conditions of a life in some young girl’s
old and irritated cunt, one can even see triumphs of the human spirit—old and
badly burned labia which still come to glisten with new life, capital! There are
phalluses in porno whose distended veins speak of the integrity of the hard¬
working heart, but there is so little specific content in the faces! Hard core lulls
after it excites, and finally it puts the brain to sleep.
But Brando’s real cock up Schneider’s real vagina would have brought the his¬
tory of film one huge march closer to the ultimate experience it has promised
since its inception (which is to re-embody life). One can even see how on open¬
ing night at the Film Festival, it did not matter so much. Not fully prepared for
what was to come, the simulated sex must have quivered like real sex the first
time out. Since then we have been told the movie is great, so we are prepared
to resist greatness, and have read in Time that Schneider said, “ ‘We were never
screwing on stage. I never felt any sexual attraction for him . . . he’s almost fifty
you know, and’—she runs her hand from her torso to her midriff, ‘he’s only
beautiful to here! ’ ”
So one watches differently. Yes, they are simulating. Yes, there is something
slightly unnatural in the way they come and fall apart. It is too stylized, as if pay¬
ing a few subtle respects to Kabuki. The real need for the real cock of Brando
into the depths of the real actress might have been for those less exceptional times
which would follow the film long after it opened and the reaction had set in.
Since Tango is, however, the first major film with a respectable budget, a su¬
perbly skilled young director, an altogether accomplished cameraman, and a
great actor who is ready to do more than dabble in improvisation, indeed will
enter heavily into such near to untried movie science, so the laws of improvi¬
sation are before us, and the first law to recognize is that it is next to impossi¬
ble to build on too false a base. The real problem in movie improvisation is to
find some ending that is true to what has gone bef ore and yet is sufficiently un¬
true to enable the actors to get out alive.
We will come back to that. It is, however, hardly time to let go of our synop¬
sis. Real or simulated, opening night or months later, we know after five min¬
utes that, at the least, we are in for a thoroughgoing study of a man and a
woman, and the examination will be close. Brando rents the empty apartment;
they will visit each other there every day. His name is Paul, hers is Jeanne, but
they are not to learn each other’s names yet. They are not to tell one another
318
Sex and Scandal
such things, he informs her. “We don’t need names here . . . we’re going to
forget everything we knew. . . . Everything outside this place is bullshit.”
They are going to search for pleasure. We are back in the existential con¬
frontation of the century. Two people are going to fuck in a room until they ar¬
rive at a transcendent recognition or some death of themselves. We are dealing
not with a plot but with a theme that is open range for a hundred films. Indeed
we are face to face with the fundamental structure of porno—the difference is
that we have a director who by the measure of porno is Eisenstein, and actors
who are as gods. So the film takes up the simplest and richest of structures. To
make love in an empty apartment, then return to a separate life. It is like every
clandestine affair the audience has ever had, only more so—no names! Every
personal demon will be scourged in the sex—one will obliterate the past! That
is the huge sanction of anonymity. It is equal to a new life.
What powerful biographical details we learn, however, on the instant they
part. Paul’s wife is a suicide. Just the night before, she has killed herself with a
razor in a bathtub; the bathroom is before us, red as an abattoir. A sobbing cham¬
bermaid cleans it while she speaks in fear to Paul. It is not even certain whether
the wife is a suicide or he has killed her—that is almost not the point. It is the
bloody death suspended above his life like a bleeding amputated existence—it
is with that crimson torso before his eyes that he will make love on the follow¬
ing days.
Jeanne, in her turn, is about to be married to a young TV director. She is the
star in a videofilm he is making about French youth. She pouts, torments her fi¬
ance, delights in herself, delights in the special idiocy of men. She can cuckold
her young director to the roots of his eyes. She also delights in the violation she
will make of her own bourgeois roots. In this TV film she makes within the movie
she presents her biography to her fiance’s camera: she is the daughter of a dead
Army officer who was sufficiently racist to teach his dog to detect Arabs by smell.
So she is well brought up—there are glimpses of a suburban villa on a small
walled estate—it is nothing less than the concentrated family honor of the
French Army she will surrender when Brando proceeds a little later to bugger
her.
These separate backgrounds divide the film as neatly between biography and
fornication as those trick highball glasses which present a drawing of a man or a
woman wearing clothes on the outside of the tumbler and nude on the inside.
Each time Brando and Schneider leave the room we learn more of their lives be¬
yond the room; each time they come together, we are ready to go further. In
addition, as if to enrich his theme for students of film, Bertolucci offers touches
from the history of French cinema. The life preserver in Atalante appears by way
of homage to Vigo, and Jean-Pierre Leaud of The 400 Blows is the TV director,
the boy now fully grown. Something of the brooding echo of Le Jour Se Leve and
Norman Mailer
3 i 9
Arletty is also with us, that somber memory of Jean Gabin wandering along the
wet docks in the dawn, waiting for the police to pick him up after he has mur¬
dered his beloved. It is as if we are to think not only of this film but of other
sexual tragedies French cinema has brought us, until the sight of each gray and
silent Paris street is ready to evoke the lost sound of the Bal musette and the sad
near-silent wash of the Seine. Nowhere as in Paris can doomed lovers succeed
in passing sorrow, drop by drop, through the blood of the audience’s heart.
Yet as the film progresses with every skill in evidence, while Brando gives a per¬
formance that is unforgettable (and Schneider shows every promise of becom¬
ing a major star), as the historic buggeries and reamings are delivered, and the
language breaks through barriers not even yet erected—no general of censor¬
ship could know the armies of obscenity were so near!—as these shocks multi¬
ply, and lust goes up the steps to love, something bizarre happens to the film.
It fails to explode. It is a warehouse of dynamite and yet something goes wrong
with the blow-up.
One leaves the theater bewildered. A fuse was never ignited. Butwhere was
it set? One looks to retrace the line of the story.
So we return to Paul trying to rise out of the bloody horizon of his wife’s
death. We even have some instinctive comprehension of how he must degrade
his beautiful closet-fuck, indeed we are even given the precise detail that he will
grease her ass with butter before he buggers her family pride. A scene or two
later, he tricks forth her fear of him by dangling a dead rat which he offers to
eat. “I’ll save the asshole for you,” he tells her. “Rat’s asshole with mayon¬
naise.”* (The audience roars—Brando knows audiences.) She is standing before
him in a white wedding gown—she has run away from a TV camera crew that
was getting ready to film her pop wedding. She has rushed to the apartment in
the rain. Now shivering, but recovered from her fear, she tells him she has fallen
in love with somebody. He tells her to take a hot bath, or she’ll catch pneumo¬
nia, die, and all he’ll get is “to fuck the dead rat.”
No, she protests, she’s in love.
“In ten years,” says Brando looking at her big breasts, “you’re going to be play¬
ing soccer with your tits.” But the thought of the other lover is grinding away
at him. “Is he a good fucker?”
“Magnificent.”
“ You know, you’re a j erk. ’ Cause the best fucking you’re going t o get i s right
here in this apartment.”
♦Dialogue from Last Tango i n Paris was not entirely written i n advance, but was i n part an improvisation. I n other
words, a small but important part of the screenplay has in effect been written by Brando.
3 2 o
Sex and Scandal
No, no, she tells him, the lover is wonderful, a mystery . . . different.
“A local pimp?”
“He could be. He looks it.”
She will never, he tells her, be able to find love until she goes “right up into
the ass of death.” He is one lover who is not afraid of metaphor. “Right up his
ass—till you find a womb of fear. And then maybe you’ll be able to find him.”
“But I’ve found this man,” says Jeanne. Metaphor has continued long enough
for her. “He’s you. You’re that man.”
In the old scripted films, such a phrase was plucked with a movie composer’s
chord. But this is improvisation. Brando’s instant response is to tell her to get
a scissors and cut the fingernails on her right hand. Two fingers will do. Put those
fingers up his ass.
"Quoi?”
“Put your fingers up my ass, are you deaf? Go on.”
No, he is not too sentimental. Love is never flowers, but farts and flowers.
Plus every superlative test. So we see Brando’s face before us—it is that tragic
angelic mask of incommunicable anguish which has spoken to us across the years
of his uncharted heroic depths. Now he is entering that gladiator’s fundament
again, and before us and before millions of faces yet to come she will be his sur¬
rogate bugger, real or simulated. What an entrance into the final images of
history! He speaks to us with her body behind him, and her fingers just con¬
ceivably up him. “I’m going to get a pig,” are the words which come out of his
tragic face, “and I’m going to have a pig fuck you,”—yes, the touch on his hole
has broken open one gorgon of a fantasy—“and I want the pig to vomit in your
face. And I want you to swallow the vomit. You going to do that for me?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah!”
“And I want the pig to die while,”—a profound pause—“while you’re fuck¬
ing him. And then you have to go behind, and I want you to smell the dying farts
of the pig. Are you going to do that for me?”
“Yes, and more than that. And worse than before.”
He has plighted a troth. In our year of the twentieth century how could we ever
contract for love with less than five hundred pounds of pig shit? With his courage
to give himself away, we finally can recognize the tragedy of his expression across
these twenty-five years. That expression has been locked into the impossibility
of ever communicating such a set of private thoughts through his beggar’s art as
an actor. Yet he has just done it. He is probably the only actor in the world who
could have done it. He is taking the shit that is in him and leaving it on us. How
Norman Mailer
32i
the audience loves it. They have come to be covered. The world is not polluted
for nothing. There is some profound twentieth-century malfunction in the elim¬
ination of waste. And Brando is on to it. A stroke of genius to have made a speech
like that. Over and over, he is saying in this film that one only arrives at love by
springing out of the shit in oneself.
So he seeks to void his eternal waste over the wife’s suicide. He sits by her
laid-out corpse in a grim hotel room, curses her, weeps, proceeds to wipe off
the undertaker’s lipstick, broods on her lover (who lives upstairs in the hotel),
and goes through some bend of the obscure, for now, off-stage, he proceeds to
remove his furniture from the new apartment. We realize this as we see Jeanne
in the empty rooms. Paul has disappeared. He has ordered her to march into
the farts of the pig for nothing. So she calls her TV director to look at the empty
apartment—should they rent it? The profound practicality of the French bour¬
geoisie is squatting upon us. She appreciates the value of a few memories to offer
sauce for her lean marriage. But the TV director must smell this old cooking for
he takes off abruptly after telling her he will look for a better apartment.
Suddenly Brando is before her again on the street. Has he been waiting for
her to appear? He looks rejuvenated. “It’s over,” she tells him. “It’s over,” he
replies. “Then it begins again.” He is in love with her. He reveals his biography,
his dead wife, his unromantic details. “I’ve got a prostate like an Idaho potato
but I’m still a good stick man. ... I suppose if I hadn’t met you I’d probably
settle for a hard chair and a hemorrhoid.” They move on to a hall, some near
mythical species of tango palace where a dance contest is taking place. They get
drunk and go on the floor. Brando goes in for a squalid parody of the tango. When
they’re removed by the judges, he flashes his bare ass.
Now they sit down again and abruptly the love affair is terminated. Like that!
She is bored with him. Something has happened. We do not know what. Is she
a bourgeoise repelled by his flophouse? Or did his defacement of the tango in¬
jure some final nerve of upper French deportment? Too small a motive. Must
we decide that sex without a mask is no longer love, or conclude upon reflec¬
tion that no mask is more congenial to passion than to be without a name in the
bed of a strange lover?
There are ten reasons why her love could end, but we know none of them.
She merely wants to be rid of him. Deliver me from a fifty-year-old, may even
be her only cry.
She tries to flee. He follows. He follows her on the Metro and all the way to
her home. He climbs the spiraling stairs as she mounts in the slow elevator, he
rams into her mother’s apartment with her, breathless, chewing gum, leering.
Now he is all cock. He is the memory of every good fuck he has given her. “This
is the title shot, baby. We’re going all the way.”
She takes out her father’s army pistol and shoots him. He murmurs, “Our
322 Sex and Scandal
children, our children, our children will remember ...” and staggers out to the
balcony, looks at the Paris morning, takes out his chewing gum, fixes it care¬
fully to the underside of the iron railing in a move that is pure broth of Brando—
culture is a goat turd on the bust of Goethe—and dies. The angel with the tragic
face slips off the screen. And proud Maria Schneider is suddenly and most un¬
believably reduced to a twat copping a plea. “I don’t know who he is,” she mut¬
ters in her mind to the oncomingflics, “he followed me in the street, he tried to
rape me, he is insane. I do not know his name. I do not know who he is. He
wanted to rape me.”
The film ends. The questions begin. We have been treated to more cinematic
breakthrough than any film—at the least—since / Am Curious, Yellow. In fact we
have gone much further. It is hard to think of any film that has taken a larger
step. Yet if this is “the most powerful erotic film ever made” then sex is as Ex-
Lax to the lady. For we have been given a bath in shit with no reward. The film,
for all its power, has turned inside out by the end. We have been asked to fol¬
low two serious and more or less desperate lovers as they go through the locks
of lust and defecation, through some modem species of homegrown cancer cure,
if you will, and have put up with their modern depths—shit on the face of the
beloved and find love!—only to discover a peculiar extortion in the aesthetic.
We have been taken on this tour down to the prostate big as an Idaho potato
only to recognize that we never did get into an exploration of the catacombs of
love, passion, infancy, sodomy, tenderness, and the breaking of emotional ice,
instead only wandered from one onanist’s oasis to another.
It is, however, a movie that has declared itself, by the power of its opening,
as equal in experience to a great fuck, and so the measure of its success or fail¬
ure is by the same sexual aesthetic. Rarely has a film’s value depended so much
on the power or lack of power of its ending, even as a f uck thatisfullof promise
is ready to be pinched by a poor end. So, in Tango, there is no gathering of forces
for the conclusion, no whirling of sexual destinies (in this case, the audience and
the actors) into the same funnel of becoming, no flying out of the senses in pur¬
suit of a new vision, no, just the full charge into a blank wall, a masturbator’s
spasm—came for the wrong reason and on the wrong thought—and one is
thrown back, shattered, too ubiquitously electrified, and full of criticism for the
immediate past. Now the recollected flaws of the film eat at the pleasure, even
as the failed orgasm of a passionate act will call the character of the passion into
question.
So the walk out of the theater is with anger. The film has been in reach of the
greatness Kael has been talking about, but the achievement has only been par¬
tial. Like all executions less divine than their conception Tango will give rise to
Mario Puzo
323
mutations that are obliged to explore into dead ends. More aesthetic pollution
to come! The performance by Brando has been unique, historic, without com¬
pare—it is just possible, however, that it has gone entirely in the wrong direc¬
tion. He has been like a lover who keeps telling consummate dirty jokes until
the ravaged dawn when the girl will say, “Did you come to sing or to screw?”
He has come with great honor and dignity and exceptional courage to bare his
soul. But in a solo. We are being given a fuck film without the fuck. It is like a
Western without the horses.
Mario Puzo
Did Mario Puzo really model Johnny Fontane on the life of Frank Sinatra? What was im¬
portant was that everyone thought so, just as The Godfather's millions of readers be¬
lieved that Puzo was revealing the inside workings of the mob in America. Flere are two
excerpts, one about Fontane, the other leading up to what became the movie’s most shock-
in g ima ge.
from The Godfather
They were all proud of him. He was of them and he had become a famous singer,
a movie star who slept with the most desired women in the world. And yet he
had shown proper respect for his Godfather by traveling three thousand miles
to attend this wedding. He still loved old friends like Nino Valenti. Many of the
people there had seen Johnny and Nino singing together when they were just
boys, when no one dreamed that Johnny Fontane would grow up to hold the
hearts of fifty million women in his hands.
Johnny Fontane reached down and lifted the bride up on to the bandstand so
that Connie stood between him and Nino. Both men crouched down, facing each
other, Nino plucking the mandolin for a few harsh chords. It was an old routine
of theirs, a mock battle and wooing, using their voices like swords, each shout-
324
Sex and Scandal
ing a chorus in turn. With the most delicate courtesy, Johnny let Nino’s voice
overwhelm his own, let Nino take the bride from his arm, let Nino swing into
the last victorious stanza while his own voice died away. The whole wedding
party broke into shouts of applause, the three of them embraced each other at
the end. The guests begged for another song.
Only Don Corleone, standing in the comer entrance of the house, sensed
something amiss. Cheerily, with bluff good humor, careful not to give offense
to his guests, he called out, “My godson has come three thousand miles to do us
honor and no one thinks to wet his throat?” At once a dozen full wine glasses
were thrust at Johnny Fontane. He took a sip from all and rushed to embrace
his Godfather. As he did so he whispered something into the older man’s ear.
Don Corleone led him into the house.
Tom Hagen held out his hand when Johnny came into the room. Johnny shook
it and said, “How are you, Tom?” But without his usual charm that consisted of
a genuine warmth for people. Hagen was a little hurt by this coolness but
shrugged it off. It was one of the penalties for being the Don’s hatchet man.
Johnny Fontane said to the Don, “When I got the wedding invitation I said
to myself, ‘My Godfather isn’t mad at me anymore. ’ I called you five times after
my divorce and Tom always told me you were out or busy so I knew you were
sore.”
Don Corleone was filling glasses from the yellow bottle of Strega. “That’s all
forgotten. Now. Can I do something for you still? You’re not too famous, too
rich, that I can’t help you?”
Johnny gulped down the yellow fiery liquid and held out his glass to be re¬
filled. He tried to sound jaunty. “I’m not rich, Godfather. I’mgoing down. You
were right. I should never have left my wife and kids for that tramp I married.
I don’t blame you for getting sore at me.”
The Don shrugged. “I worried about you, you’re my godson, that’s all.”
Johnny paced up and down the room. “I was crazy about that bitch. The
biggest star in Hollywood. She looks like an angel. And you know what she does
after a picture? If the makeup man does a good job on her face, she lets him bang
her. If the cameraman made her look extra good, she brings him into her dress¬
ing room and gives him a screw. Anybody. She uses her body like I use the loose
change in my pocket for a tip. A whore made for the devil.”
Don Corleone curtly broke in. “How is your family?”
Johnny sighed. “I took care of them. After the divorce I gave Ginny and the
kids more than the courts said I should. I go see them once a week. I miss them.
Sometimes I think I’m going crazy.” He took another drink. “Now my second
wife laughs at me. She can’t understand my being jealous. She calls me an old-
fashioned guinea, she makes fun of my singing. Before I left I gave her a nice
beating but not in the face because she was making a picture. I gave her cramps,
Mario Puzo
I punched her on the arms and legs like a kid and she kept laughing at me.” He
lit a cigarette. “So, Godfather, right now, life doesn’t seem worth living.”
Don Corleone said simply. “These are troubles I can’t help you with.” He
paused, then asked, “What’s the matter with your voice?”
All the assured charm, the self -mockery, disappeared from Johnny Fontane’s
face. He said almost brokenly, “Godfather, I can’t sing anymore, something hap¬
pened to my throat, the doctors don’t know what.” Hagen and the Don looked
at him with surprise, Johnny had always been so tough. Fontane went on. “My
two pictures made a lot of money. I was a big star. Now they throw me out.
The head of the studio always hated my guts and now he’s paying me off.”
Don Corleone stood before his godson and asked grimly, “Why doesn’t this
man like you?”
“I used to sing those songs for the liberal organizations, you know, all that
stuff you never liked me to do. Well, Jack Woltz didn’t like it either. He called
me a Communist, but he couldn’t make it stick. Then I snatched a girl he had
saved for himself. It was strictly a one-night stand and she came after me. What
the hell could I do? Then my whore second wife throws me out. And Ginny and
the kids won’t take me back unless I come crawling on my hands and knees, and
I can’t sing anymore. Godfather, what the hell can I do?”
Don Corleone’s face had become cold without a hint of sympathy. He said
contemptuously, “You can start by acting like a man.” Suddenly anger con¬
torted his face. He shouted, “like a man!” He reached over the desk and grabbed
Johnny Fontane by the hair of his head in a gesture that was savagely affection¬
ate. “By Christ in heaven, is it possible that you spent so much time in my pres¬
ence and turned out no better than this? A Hollywood J'inocchio who weeps and
begs for pity? Who cries out like a woman—‘What shall I do? Oh, what shall I
do?’ ”
The mimicry of the Don was so extraordinary, so unexpected, that Hagen
and Johnny were startled into laughter. Don Corleone was pleased. For a mo¬
ment he reflected on how much he loved this godson. How would his own three
sons have reacted to such a tongue-lashing? Santino would have sulked and be¬
haved badly forweeks afterward. Fredo would have been cowed. Michael would
have given him a cold smile and gone out of the house, not to be seen for
months. But Johnny, ah, what a fine chap he was, smiling now, gathering
strength, knowing already the true purpose of his Godfather.
Don Corleone went on. “Y ou took the woman of your boss, a man more pow¬
erful than yourself, then you complain he won’t help you. What nonsense. You
left your family, your children without a father, to marry a whore and you weep
because they don’t welcome you back with open arms. The whore, you don’t
hither in the face because she is making a picture, then you are amazed because
she laughs at you. You lived like a fool and you have come to a fool’s end.”
3 26
Sex and Scandal
Don Corleone paused to ask in a patient voice, “Are you willing to take my
advice this time?”
Johnny Fontane shrugged. “I can’t marry Ginny again, not the way she wants.
I have to gamble, I have to drink, I have to go out with the boys. Beautiful broads
run after me and I never could resist them. Then I used to feel like a heel when
I went back to Ginny. Christ, I can’t go through all that crap again.”
It was rare that Don Corleone showed exasperation. “I didn’t tell you to get
married again. Do what you want. It’s good you wish to be a father to your chil¬
dren. A man who is not a father to his children can never be a real man. But
then, you must make their mother accept you. Who says you can’t see them
every day? Who says you can’t live in the same house? Who says you can’t live
your life exactly as you want to live it?”
Johnny Fontane laughed. “Godfather, not all women are like the old Italian
wives. Ginny won’t stand for it.”
Now the Don was mocking. “Because you acted like a finocchio. You gave her
more than the court said. You didn’t hit the other in the face because she was
making a picture. You let women dictate your actions and they are not compe¬
tent in this world, though certainly they will be saints in heaven while we men
bum in hell. And then I’ve watched you all these years.’” The Don’s voice be¬
came earnest. “You’ve been a fine godson, you’ve given me all the respect. But
what of your other old friends? One year you run around with this person, the
next year with another person. That Italian boy who was so funny in the movies,
he had some bad luck and you never saw him again because you were more fa¬
mous. And how about your old, old comrade that you went to school with, who
was your partner singing? Nino. He drinks too much out of disappointment but
he never complains. He works hard driving the gravel truck and sings weekends
for a few dollars. He never says anything against you. You couldn’t help him a
bit? Why not? He sings well.”
Johnny Fontane said with patient weariness, “Godfather, he just hasn’t got
enough talent. He’s OK, but he’s not big time.”
Don Corleone lidded his eyes almost closed and then said, “And you, god¬
son, you now, you just don’t have talent enough. Shall I get you a job on the
gravel truck with Nino?” When Johnny didn’t answer, the Don went on. “Friend¬
ship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government.
It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of
friendships you wouldn’t have to ask me to help. Now tell me, why can’t you
sing? You sang well in the garden. As well as Nino.”
Hagen and Johnny smiled at this delicate thrust. It was Johnny’s turn to be
patronizingly patient. “My voice is weak. I sing one or two songs and then I can’t
sing again for hours or days. 1 can’t make it through the rehearsals or the re¬
takes. My voice is weak, it’s got some sort of sickness.”
Mario Puzo
327
“So you have woman trouble. Your voice is sick. Now tell me the trouble
you’re having with this Hollywood pezzonovante who won’t let you work.” The
Don was getting down to business.
“He’s biggerthan one of your pezzonovantes," Johnny said. “He owns the stu¬
dio. He advises the President on movie propaganda for the war. Just a month
ago he bought the movie rights to the biggest novel of the year. A best seller.
And the main character is a guy just like me. I wouldn’t even have to act, just
be myself. I wouldn’t even have to sing. I might even win the Academy Award.
Everybody knows it’s perfect for me and I’d be big again. As an actor. But that
bastard Jack Woltz is paying me off, he won’t give it to me. I offered to do it
for nothing, for a minimum price and he still says no. He sent the word that if
I come and kiss his ass in the studio commissary, maybe he’ll think about it.”
Don Corleone dismissed this emotional nonsense with a wave of his hand.
Among reasonable men problems of business could always be solved. He pat¬
ted his godson on the shoulder. “You’re discouraged. Nobody cares about you,
so you think. And you’ve lost a lot of weight. You drink a lot, eh? You don’t
sleep and you take pills?” He shook his head disapprovingly.
“Now I want you to follow my orders,” the Don said. “I want you to stay in
my house for one month. 1 want you to eat well, to rest and sleep. I want you
to be my companion, I enjoy your company, and maybe you can learn some-
thingabout the world from your Godfather that might even help you in the great
Hollywood. But no singing, no drinking and no women. At the end of the
month you can go back to Hollywood and this pezzonovante, this .90 caliber will
give you that job you want. Done?”
Johnny Fontane could not altogether believe that the Don had such power.
But his Godfather had never said such and such a thing could be done without
having it done. “This guy is a personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover,” Johnny said.
“You can’t even raise your voice to him.”
“He’s a businessman,” the Don said blandly. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t
refuse.”
“It’s too late,” Johnny said. “All the contracts have been signed and they start
shooting in a week. It’s absolutely impossible.”
Don Corleone said, “Go, go back to the party. Your friends are waiting for
you. Leave everything to me.” He pushed Johnny Fontane out of the room.
Hagen sat behind the desk and made notes. The Don heaved a sigh and asked,
“Is there anything else?”
“Sollozzo can’t be put off any more. You’ll have to see him this week.” Hagen
held his pen over the calendar.
The Don shrugged. “Now that the wedding is over, whenever you like.”
This answer told Hagen two things. Most important, that the answer to Vir¬
gil Sollozzo would be no. The second, that Don Corleone, since he would not
328
Sex and Scandal
give the answer before his daughter’s wedding, expected his no to cause trou¬
ble.
Hagen said cautiously, “Shall 1 tell Clemenza to have some men come live in
the house?”
The Don said impatiently, “For what? 1 didn’t answer before the wedding be¬
cause on an important day like that there should be no cloud, not even in the
distance. Also 1 wanted to know beforehand what he wanted to talk about. We
know now. What he will propose is an infamita."
Hagen asked, “Then you will refuse?” When the Don nodded, Hagen said, “I
think we should all discuss it—the whole Family—before you give your answer.”
The Don smiled. “You think so? Good, we will discuss it. When you come
back from California. 1 want you to fly there tomorrow and settle this business
for Johnny. See that movie pezzonovante. ..."
It was still dark when the plane landed in Los Angeles. Hagen checked into his
hotel, showered and shaved, and watched dawn come over the city. He ordered
breakfast and newspapers to be sent up to his room and relaxed until it was time
for his ten a.m. appointment with Jack Woltz. The appointment had been sur¬
prisingly easy to make.
The day before, Hagen had called the most powerful man in the movie labor
unions, a man named Billy Goff. Acting on instructions from Don Corleone,
Hagen had told Goff to arrange an appointment on the next day for Hagen to
call on Jack Woltz, that he should hint to Woltz that if Hagen was not made happy
by the results of the interview, there could be a labor strike at the movie stu¬
dio. An hour later Hagen received a call from Goff. The appointment would be
at ten a.m. Woltz had gotten the message about the possible labor strike but
hadn’t seemed too impressed, Goff said. He added, “If it really comes down to
that, I gotta talk to the Don myself.”
“If it comes to that he’ll talk to you,” Hagen said. By saying this he avoided
making any promises. He was not surprised that Goff was so agreeable to the
Don’s wishes. The family empire, technically, did not extend beyond the New
York area but Don Corleone had first become strong by helping labor leaders.
Many of them still owed him debts of friendship.
But the ten a.m. appointment was a bad sign. It meant that he would be first
on the appointment list, that he would not be invited to lunch. It meant that
Woltz held him in small worth. Goff had not been threatening enough, proba¬
bly because Woltz had him on his graft payroll. And sometimes the Don’s suc¬
cess in keeping himself out of the limelight worked to the disadvantage of the
family business, in that his name did not mean anything to outside circles.
His analysis proved correct. Woltz kept him waiting for a half hour past the
Mario Puzo
3 2 9
appointed time. Hagen didn’t mind. The reception room was very plush, very
comfortable, and on a plum-colored couch opposite him sat the most beautiful
child Hagen had ever seen. She was no more than eleven or twelve, dressed in
a very expensive but simple way as a grown woman. She had incredibly golden
hair, huge deep sea-blue eyes and a fresh raspberry-red mouth. She was guarded
by a woman obviously her mother, who tried to stare Hagen down with a cold
arrogance that made him want to punch her in the face. The angel child and the
dragon mother, Hagen thought, returning the mother’s cold stare.
Finally an exquisitely dressed but stout middle-aged woman came to lead him
through a string of offices to the office-apartment of the movie producer. Hagen
was impressed by the beauty of the offices and the people working in them. He
smiled. They were all shrewdies, trying to get their foot in the movie door by
taking office jobs, and most of them would work in these offices for the rest of
their lives or until they accepted defeat and returned to their home towns.
Jack Woltz was a tall, powerfully built man with a heavy paunch almost con¬
cealed by his perfectly tailored suit. Hagen knew his history. At ten years of age
Woltz had hustled empty beer kegs and pushcarts on the East Side. At twenty
he helped his father sweat garment workers. At thirty he had left New York and
moved West, invested in the nickelodeon and pioneered motion pictures. At
forty-eight he had been the most powerful movie magnate in Hollywood, still
rough-spoken, rapaciously amorous, a raging wolf ravaging helpless flocks of
young starlets. At fifty he transformed himself. He took speech lessons, learned
how to dress from an English valet and how to behave socially from an English
butler. When his first wife died he married a world-famous and beautiful ac¬
tress who didn’t like acting. Now at the age of sixty he collected old master paint¬
ings, was a member of the President’s Advisory Committee, and had set up a
multimillion-dollar foundation in his name to promote art in motion pictures.
His daughter had married an English lord, his son an Italian princess.
His latest passion, as reported dutifully by every movie columnist in Amer¬
ica, was his own racing stables on which he had spent ten million dollars in the
past year. He had made headlines by purchasing the famed English racing horse
Khartoum for the incredible price of six hundred thousand dollars and then an¬
nouncing that the undefeated racer would be retired and put to stud exclusively
for the Woltz stables.
He received Hagen courteously, his beautifully, evenly tanned, meticulously
barbered face contorted with a grimace meant to be a smile. Despite all the
money spent, despite the ministrations of the most knowledgeable technicians,
his age showed; the flesh of his face looked as if it had been seamed together.
But there was an enormous vitality in his movements and he had what Don Cor-
leone had, the air of a man who commanded absolutely the world in which he
lived.
33 °
Sex and Scandal
Hagen came directly to the point. That he was an emissary from a friend of
Johnny Fontane. That this friend was a very powerful man who would pledge
his gratitude and undying friendship to Mr. Woltz if Mr. Woltz would grant a
small favor. The small favor would be the casting of Johnny Fontane in the new
war movie the studio planned to start next week.
The seamed face was impassive, polite. “What favors can your friend do me?”
Woltz asked. There was just a trace of condescension in his voice.
Hagen ignored the condescension. He explained. “You’ve got some labor
trouble coming up. My friend can absolutely guarantee to make that trouble dis¬
appear. You have a top male star who makes a lot of money for your studio but
he just graduated from marijuana to heroin. My friend will guarantee that your
male star won’t be able to get any more heroin. And if some other little things
come up over the years a phone call to me can solve your problems.”
Jack Woltz listened to this as if he were hearing the boasting of a child. Then
he said harshly, his voice deliberately all East Side, “You trying to put muscle
on me?”
Hagen said coolly, “Absolutely not. I’ve come to ask a service for a friend.
I’ve tried to explain that you won’t lose anything by it.”
Almost as if he willed it, Woltz made his face a mask of anger. The mouth
curled, his heavy brows, dyed black, contracted to form a thick line over his glint¬
ing eyes. He leaned over the desk toward Hagen. “All right, you smooth son of
a bitch, let me lay it on the line for you and your boss, whoever he is. Johnny
Fontane never gets that movie. I don’t care how many guinea Mafia goombahs
come out of the woodwork.” He leaned back. “A word of advice to you, my
friend. J. Edgar Hoover, I assume you’ve heard of him”—Woltz smiled
sardonically—“is a personal friend of mine. If I let him know I’m being pres¬
sured, you guys will never know what hit you.”
Hagen listened patiently. He had expected better from a man of Woltz’s
stature. Was it possible that a man who acted this stupidly could rise to the head
of a company worth hundreds of millions? That was something to think about
since the Don was looking for new things to put money into, and if the top brains
of this industry were so dumb, movies might be the thing. The abuse itself both¬
ered him not at all. Hagen had learned the art of negotiation from the Don him¬
self. “Never get angry,” the Don had instructed. “Never make a threat. Reason
with people.” The word “reason” sounded so much better in Italian, rajunah, to
rejoin. The art of this was to ignore all insults, all threats; to turn the other cheek.
Hagen had seen the Don sit at a negotiating table for eight hours, swallowing
insults, trying to persuade a notorious and megalomaniac strong-arm man to
mend his ways. At the end of the eight hours Don Corleone had thrown up his
hands in a helpless gesture and said to the other men at the table, “But no one
can reason with this fellow,” and had stalked out of the meeting room. The
Mario Puzo
331
strong-arm man had turned white with fear. Emissaries were sent to bring the
Don back into the room. An agreement was reached but two months later the
strong-arm was shot to death in his favorite barbershop.
So Hagen started again, speaking in the most ordinary voice. “Look at my
card,” he said. “I’m a lawyer. Would I stick my neck out? Have I uttered one
threatening word? Let me just say that I am prepared to meet any condition you
name to get Johnny Fontane that movie. I think I’ve already offered a great deal
for such a small favor. A favor that I understand it would be in your interest to
grant. Johnny tells me that you admit he would be perfect for that part. And let
me say that this favor would never be asked if that were not so. In fact, if you’re
worried about your investment, my client would finance the picture. But please
let me make myself absolutely clear. We understand your no is no. Nobody can
force you or is trying to. We know about your friendship with Mr. Hoover, I
may add, and my boss respects you for it. He respects that relationship very
much.”
Woltz had been doodling with a huge, red-feathered pen. At the mention of
money his interest was aroused and he stopped doodling. He said patronizingly,
“This picture is budgeted at five million.”
Hagen whistled softly to show that he was impressed. Then he said very ca¬
sually, “My boss has a lot of friends who back his judgment.”
For the first time Woltz seemed to take the whole thing seriously. He stud¬
ied Hagen’s card. “I never heard of you,” he said. “I know most of the big
lawyers in New York, but just who the hell are you?”
“I have one of those dignified corporate practices,” Hagen said dryly. “I just
handle this one account.” He rose. “I won’t take up any more of your time.” He
held out his hand, Woltz shook it. Hagen took a few steps toward the door and
turned to face Woltz again. “I understand you have to deal with a lot of people
who try to seem more important than they are. In my case the reverse is true.
Why don’t you check me out with our mutual friend? If you reconsider, call me
at my hotel.” He paused. “This may be sacrilege to you, but my client can do
things for you that even Mr. Hoover might find out of his range.” He saw the
movie producer’s eyes narrowing. Woltz was finally getting the message. “By
the way, I admire your pictures very much,” Hagen said in the most fawning
voice he could manage. “I hope you can keep up the good work. Our country
needs it.”
Late that afternoon Hagen received a call from the producer’s secretary that
a car would pick him up within the hour to take him out to Mr. Woltz’s coun¬
try home for dinner. She told him it would be about a three-hour drive but that
the car was equipped with a bar and some hors d’oeuvres. Hagen knew that
Woltz made the trip in his private plane and wondered why he hadn’t been in¬
vited to make the trip by air. The secretary’s voice was adding politely, “Mr.
332
Sex and Scandal
Woltz suggested you bring an overnight bag and he’ll get you to the airport in
the morning.”
“I’ll do that,” Hagen said. That was another thing to wonder about. How did
Woltz know he was taking the morning plane back to New York? He thought
about it for a moment. The most likely explanation was that Woltz had set pri¬
vate detectives on his trail to get all possible information. Then Woltz certainly
knew he represented the Don, which meant that he knew something about the
Don, which in turn meant that he was now ready to take the whole matter se¬
riously. Something might be done after all, Hagen thought. And maybe Woltz
was smarter than he had appeared this morning.
The home of Jack Woltz looked like an implausible movie set. There was a
plantation-type mansion, huge grounds girdled by a rich black-dirt bridle path,
stables and pasture for a herd of horses. The hedges, flower beds and grasses
were as carefully manicured as a movie star’s nails.
Woltz greeted Hagen on a glass-panel air-conditioned porch. The producer
was informally dressed in blue silk shirt open at the neck, mustard-colored
slacks, soft leather sandals. Framed in all this color and rich fabric his seamed,
tough face was startling. He handed Hagen an outsized martini glass and took
one for himself from the prepared tray. He seemed more friendly than he had
been earlier in the day. He put his arm over Hagen’s shoulder and said, “We
have a little time before dinner, let’s go look at my horses.” As they walked to¬
ward the stables he said, “I checked you out, T om; you should have told me your
boss is Corleone. I thought you were just some third-rate hustler Johnny was
running in to bluff me. And I don’t bluff. Not that I want to make enemies, I
never believed in that. But let’s just enjoy ourselves now. We can talk business
after dinner.”
Surprisingly Woltz proved to be a truly considerate host. He explained his
new methods, innovations that he hoped would make his stable the most suc¬
cessful in America. The stables were all fire-proofed, sanitized to the highest de¬
gree, and guarded by a special security detail of private detectives. Finally Woltz
led him to a stall which had a huge bronze plaque attached to its outside wall.
On the plaque was the name “Khartoum.”
The horse inside the stall was, even to Hagen’s inexperienced eyes, a beau¬
tiful animal. Khartoum’s skin was jet black except for a diamond-shaped white
patch on his huge forehead. The great brown eyes glinted like golden apples,
the black skin over the taut body was silk. Woltz said with childish pride, “The
greatest racehorse in the world. I bought him in England last year for six hun¬
dred grand. I bet even the Russian Czars never paid that much for a single horse.
But I’m not going to race him, I’m going to put him to stud. I’m going to build
Mario Puzo
333
the greatest racing stable this country has ever known.” He stroked the horse's
mane and called out softly, “Khartoum, Khartoum.” There was real love in his
voice and the animal responded. Woltz said to Hagen, “I'm a good horseman,
you know, and the first time I ever rode I was fifty years old.” He laughed.
“Maybe one of my grandmothers in Russia got raped by a Cossack and I got his
blood.” He tickled Khartoum’s belly and said with sincere admiration, “Look at
that cock on him. I should have such a cock.”
They went back to the mansion to have dinner. It was served by three wait¬
ers under the command of a butler, the table linen and ware were all gold
thread and silver, but Hagen found the food mediocre. Woltz obviously lived
alone, and just as obviously was not a man who cared about food. Hagen waited
until they had both lit up huge Havana cigars before he asked Woltz, “Does
Johnny get it or not?”
“I can’t,” Woltz said. “I can’t put Johnny into that picture even if I wanted
to. The contracts are all signed for all the performers and the cameras roll next
week. There’s no way I can swing it.”
Hagen said impatiently, “Mr. Woltz, the big advantage of dealing with a man
at the top is that such an excuse is not valid. You can do anything you want to
do.” He puffed on his cigar. “Don’t you believe my client can keep his promises?”
Woltz said dryly, “I believe that I’m going to have labor trouble. Goff called
me up on that, the son of a bitch, and the way he talked to me you’d never guess
I pay him a hundred grand a year under the table. And I believe you can get that
fag he-man star of mine off heroin. But I don’t care about that and I can finance
my own pictures. Because I hate that bastard Fontane. Tell your boss this is one
favor I can’t give but that he should try me again on anything else. Anything at
all.”
Hagen thought, you sneaky bastard, then why the hell did you bring me all
the way out here? The producer had something on his mind. Hagen said coldly,
“I don’t think you understand the situation. Mr. Corleone is Johnny Fontane’s
godfather. That is a very close, a very sacred religious relationship.” Woltz
bowed his head in respect at this reference to religion. Hagen went on. “Italians
have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look
after him, and that's why they have godfathers. Since Johnny’s father died, Mr.
Corleone feels his responsibility even more deeply. As for trying you again, Mr.
Corleone is much too sensitive. He never asks a second favor where he has been
refused the first.”
Woltz shrugged. “I’m sorry. The answer is still no. But since you’re here,
what will it cost me to have that labor trouble cleared up? In cash. Right now.”
That solved one puzzle for Hagen. Why Woltz was putting in so much time
on him when he had already decided not to give Johnny the part. And that could
not be changed at this meeting. Woltz felt secure; he was not afraid of the power
334
Sex and Scandal
of Don Corleone. And certainly Woltz with his national political connections,
his acquaintanceship with the FBI chief, his huge personal fortune and his ab¬
solute power in the film industry, could not feel threatened by Don Corleone.
To any intelligent man, even to Hagen, it seemed that Woltz had correctly as¬
sessed his position. He was impregnable to the Don if he was willing to take the
losses the labor struggle would cost. There was only one thing wrong with the
whole equation. Don Corleone had promised his godson he would get the part
and Don Corleone had never, to Hagen’s knowledge, broken his word in such
matters.
Hagen said quietly, “You are deliberately misunderstanding me. You are try¬
ing to make me an accomplice to extortion. Mr. Corleone promises only to speak
in your favor on this labor trouble as a matter of friendship in return for your
speaking in behalf of his client. A friendly exchange of influence, nothing more.
But I can see you don’t take me seriously. Personally, I think that is a mistake.”
Woltz, as if he had been waiting for such a moment, let himself get angry. “I
understood perfectly,” he said. “That’s the Mafia style, isn’t is? All olive oil and
sweet talk when what you’re really doing is making threats. So let me lay it on
the line. Johnny Fontane will never get that part and he’s perfect for it. It would
make him a great star. But he never will be because I hate that pinko punk and
I’m going to run him out of the movies. And I’ll tell you why. He ruined one
of my most valuable proteges. For five years I had this girl under training,
singing, dancing, acting lessons, I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was
going to make her a star. I’ll be even more frank, just to show you that I’m not
a hard-hearted man, that it wasn’t all dollars and cents. That girl was beautiful
and she was the greatest piece of ass I’ve ever had and I’ve had them all over the
world. She could suck you out like a water pump. Then Johnny comes along
with that olive-oil voice and guinea charm and she runs off. She threw it all away
just to make me ridiculous. A man in my position, Mr. Hagen, can’t afford to
look ridiculous. I have to pay Johnny off.”
For the first time, Woltz succeeded in astounding Hagen. He found it in¬
conceivable that a grown man of substance would let such trivialities affect his
judgment in an affair of business, and one of such importance. In Hagen’s world,
the Corleones’ world, the physical beauty, thesexual power of women, carried
not the slightest weight in worldly matters. It was a private affair, except, of
course, in matters of marriage and family disgrace. Hagen decided to make one
last try.
“You are absolutely right, Mr. Woltz,” Hagen said. “But are your grievances
that major? I don’t think you’ve understood how important this very small favor
is to my client. Mr. Corleone held the infant Johnny in his arms when he was
baptized. When Johnny’s father died, Mr. Corleone assumed the duties of par¬
enthood, indeed he is called ‘Godfather’ by many, many people who wish to
Mario Puzo
335
show their respect and gratitude for the help he has given them. Mr. Corleone
never lets his friends down.”
Woltz stood up abruptly. “I’ve listened to about enough. Thugs don’t give
me orders, I give them orders. If I pick up this phone, you’ll spend the night in
jail. And if that Mafia goombah tries any rough stuff, he’ll find out I’m not a band
leader. Yeah, I heard that story too. Listen, your Mr. Corleone will never know
what hit him. Even if I have to use my influence at the White House.”
The stupid, stupid son of a bitch. How the hell did he get to be a pezzono-
vante, Hagen wondered. Advisor to the President, head of the biggest movie stu¬
dio in the world. Definitely the Don should get into the movie business. And
the guy was taking his words at their sentimental face value. He was not getting
the message.
“Thank you for the dinner and a pleasant evening,” Hagen said. “Could you
give me transportation to the airport? I don’t think I’ll spend the night.” He
smiled coldly at Woltz. “Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news
at once.”
While waiting in the floodlit colonnade of the mansion for his car, Hagen saw
two women about to enter a long limousine already parked in the driveway. They
were the beautiful twelve-year-old blond girl and her mother he had seen in
Woltz’s office that morning. But now the girl’s exquisitely cut mouth seemed
to have smeared into a thick, pink mass. Her sea-blue eyes were filmed over and
when she walked down the steps toward the open car her long legs tottered like
a crippled foal’s. Her mother supported the child, helping her into the car, hiss¬
ing commands into her ear. The mother’s head turned for a quick furtive look
at Hagen and he saw in her eyes a burning, hawklike triumph. Then she too dis¬
appeared into the limousine.
So that was why he hadn’t got the plane ride from Los Angeles, Hagen
thought. The girl and her mother had made the trip with the movie producer.
That had given Woltz enough time to relax before dinner and do the job on the
little kid. And Johnny wanted to live in this world? Good luck to him, and good
luck to Woltz.
Jack Woltz always slept alone. He had a bed big enough for ten people and a
bedroom large enough for a movie ballroom scene, but he had slept alone since
the death of his first wife ten years before. This did not mean he no longer used
women. He was physically a vigorous man despite his age, but he could be
aroused now only by very young girls and had learned that a few hours in the
evening were all the youth of his body and his patience could tolerate.
On this Thursday morning, for some reason, he awoke early. The light of
dawn made his huge bedroom as misty as a foggy meadowland. Far down at the
336 Sex and Scandal
foot of his bed was a familiar shape and Woltz struggled up on his elbows to get
a clearer look. It had the shape of a horse’s head. Still groggy, Woltz reached
and flicked on the night table lamp.
The shock of what he saw made him physically ill. It seemed as if a great
sledgehammer had struck him on the chest, his heartbeat jumped erratically and
he became nauseous. His vomit spluttered on the thick flair rug.
Severed from its body, the black silky head of the great horse Khartoum was
stuck fast in a thick cake of blood. White, reedy tendons showed. Froth cov¬
ered the muzzle and those apple-sized eyes that had glinted like gold, were mot¬
tled the color of rotting fruit with dead, hemorrhaged blood. Woltz was struck
by a purely animal terror and out of that terror he screamed for his servants and
out of that terror he called Hagen to make his uncontrolled threats. His mani¬
acal raving alarmed the butler, who called Woltz’s personal physician and his
second in command at the studio. But Woltz regained his senses before they ar¬
rived.
He had been profoundly shocked. What kind of man could destroy an ani¬
mal worth six hundred thousand dollars? Without a word of warning. Without
any negotiation to have the act, its order, countermanded. The ruthlessness, the
sheer disregard for any values, implied a man who considered himself completely
his own law, even his own God. And a man who backed up this kind of will with
the power and cunning that held his own stable security force of no account.
For by this time Woltz had learned that the horse’s body had obviously been
heavily drugged before someone leisurely hacked the huge triangular head off
with an ax. The men on night duty claimed that they had heard nothing. To Woltz
this seemed impossible. They could be made to talk. They had been bought off
and they could be made to tell who had done the buying.
Woltz was not a stupid man, he was merely a supremely egotistical one. He
had mistaken the power he wielded in his world to be more potent than the
power of Don Corleone. He had merely needed some proof that this was not
true. He understood this message.
Eably Days
New York Times
“Edison’s Vitascope Cheered”
Philadelphia Inquirer.
“The Great Train Robbery”
The notion of film criticism as a discrete line of work is fairly modern, establishing itself
with the work of James Agee, Stark Young, Graham Greene, and others in the late 1930s.
But films have always attracted journalism, and some of the early fan magazines, like
Photoplay, were surprisingly sophisticated in their discussions of new movies. Stanley
Kaiffmann and Bruce Henstell went on an archaeological dig through old newspaper and
magazinefiles to find early examples offilm criticism, all the way back to these reports,
from the New York Times of April 24, 1896, and the Philadelphia Inquirer ofJune
26, 1904, written at the dawning of the medium.
Edison’s Vitascope Cheered
The new thing at Koster and Bial’s last night was Edison’s vitascope, exhibited
for the first time. The ingenious inventor’s latest toy is a projection of his
kinetescope figures, in stereopticon fashion, upon a white screen in a darkened
hall. In the center of the balcony of the big music hall is a curious object, which
looks from below like the double turret of a big monitor. In the front of each
half of it are two oblong holes. The turret is neatly covered with the blue vel-
339
34°
Early Days
vet brocade which is the favorite decorative material in this house. The white
screen used on the stage is framed like a picture. The moving figures are about
half life-size.
When the hall was darkened last night a buzzing and roaring were heard in
the turret, and an unusually bright light fell upon the screen. Then came into
view two precious blonde young persons of the variety stage, in pink and blue
dresses, doing the umbrella dance with commendable celerity. Their motions
were clearly defined. When they vanished, a view of an angry surf breaking on
a sandy beach near a stone pier amazed the spectators. The waves tumbled in
furiously, and the foam of the breakers flew high in the air. A burlesque boxing
match between a tall, thin comedian and a short, fat one, a comic allegory called
The Monroe Doctrine, an instant of motion in Hoyt’s farce, A Milk White Flag, re¬
peated over and over again, and a skirt dance by a tall blonde completed the
views, which were all wonderfully real and singularly exhilarating. For the spec¬
tator’s imagination filled the atmosphere with electricity, as sparks crackled
around the swiftly moving, lifelike figures.
So enthusiastic was the appreciation of the crowd long before this extraor¬
dinary exhibition was finished that vociferous cheering was heard. There were
loud calls for Mr. Edison, but he made no response.
The vitascope is only one feature of an excellent bill at Koster and Bial’s, in
which, of course, the admirable art of the London monologue man, [Albert]
Chevalier, is a notable item. There are persons who admire and understand stage
art who do not go to the music halls. For their sake it is well to say that to hear
and see Chevalier in such selections as “The Nipper’s Lullaby,” “My Old Dutch,”
and “The Old Kent Road” amply atones for any irritation an over-sensitive mind
may receive from, say, Miss Florrie West’s expression of her opinion of Eliza,
and her juvenile confidences as to the information on delicate subjects imparted
to her by Johnny Jones. People whose minds are not oversensitive find Miss West
intensely amusing. But everybody likes Chevalier, though it is doubtful if the
perfect naturalness and delicate finish of his impersonations are generally ap¬
preciated. He is not “sensational.”
The Great Train Robbery
What The Philadelphia Inquirer of June 26th, 1904 has to say
about Lubin’s Great Picture
The Great Train Robbery has proved a “thriller” i n nearly all the larger cities o f the
United States. They have been a source of wonder as to how photographs of such
a drama could have been taken in the Rocky Mountains.
Maxim Gorky
34'
The picture play begins with a view in the lonesome telegraph station, in
which an operator, receiving train orders, is overcome, bound hand and foot,
gagged, and left unconscious on the floor by the desperadoes; proceeds with the
capture of the train, murder of the fireman, killing of the express messenger,
blowing open of the safe, holdup of passengers, and shooting of one who attempts
to escape; and winds up with a horseback ride through the mountains with bags
of booty, a wild, weird dance in a log cabin, pursuit by the sheriff’s posse, and
death of all the robbers.
There is a great amount of shooting. The smoke of the pistols is plainly seen,
and men drop dead right and left, but no sound is heard. Nevertheless, while
witnessing the exhibition women put their fingers in their ears to shut out the
noise of the firing.
The fireman attacks his assailants, with six shooters in his face, while his only
weapon is the shovel, and he fails to brain his man by a narrow margin.
After one of the robbers gets him down and beats his brains out with a lump
of coal, his body is picked up and thrown off the tender.
The desperadoes are a tough-looking lot. The horses look like some of Colonel
Cody’s bronchos. They dash through the Orange Mountains with the surefoot¬
edness of burros. The men are good riders. In the pursuit by the sheriff one is
shot in the back as he dashes madly downhill, and the way in which he tumbles
from his horse and strikes the ground leaves the spectators wondering if he is
not a dummy, for it does not seem possible that a man could take such a fall and
live.
Maxim Gorky
This is the astonishing outpouring of a great writer’sfirst impressions on encountering the
new medium. Maxim Gorky (1868—1936) saw a program ofLumierefilms at a Russian
fair and published this article on July 4, 1896. It is written on a completely clear slate,
by someone who had not already been taught how to regard the cinema by a thousand
other writers, and the newness of it all leapsjrom the page. What is remarkable is Gorky’s
342
Early Days
prescience i n the last two paragraphs, as he leaps ahead from his description of thefirst
films to speculation on what directions the cinema might eventually take, toward sex and
violence. How did he know?
Lumiere
Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.
If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound,
without colour. Everything there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water
and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey
sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not
life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre.
Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indul¬
gence in symbolism. I was at Aumont’s and saw Lumiere’s cinematograph—
moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and
complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances. However, I
shall try to convey its fundamentals.
When the lights go out in the room in which Lumiere’s invention is shown,
there suddenly appears on the screen a large grey picture, “A Street in Paris”—
shadows of a bad engraving. As you gaze at it, you see carriages, buildings and
people in various poses, all frozen into immobility. All this is in grey, and the
sky above is also grey—you anticipate nothing new in this all too familiar scene,
for you have seen pictures of Paris streets more than once. But suddenly a
strange flicker passes through the screen and the picture stirs to life. Carriages
coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture are moving straight
at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people appear
and loom larger as they come closer to you; in the foreground children are play¬
ing with a dog, bicyclists tear along, and pedestrians cross the street picking their
way among the carriages. All this moves, teems with life and, upon approach¬
ing the edge of the screen, vanishes somewhere beyond it.
And all this in strange silence where no rumble of the wheels is heard, no
sound of footsteps or of speech. Nothing. Not a single note of the intricate sym¬
phony that always accompanies the movements of people. Noiselessly, the
ashen-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind, and the grey silhouettes of the
people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being
deprived of all the colours of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground.
Their smiles are lifeless, even though their movements are full of living en¬
ergy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible. Their laughter is soundless,
Maxim Gorky
343
although you see the muscles contracting in their grey faces. Before you a life is
surging, a life deprived of words and shorn of the living spectrum of colours—
the grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.
It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows.
Curses and ghosts, the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eternal sleep,
come to mind and you feel as though Merlin’s vicious trick is being enacted be¬
fore you. As though he had bewitched the entire street, he compressed its many-
storied buildings from roof-tops to foundations to yard-like size. He dwarfed
the people in corresponding proportion, robbing them of the power of speech
and scraping together all the pigment of earth and sky into a monotonous grey
colour.
Under this guise he shoved his grotesque creation into a niche in the dark room
of a restaurant. Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train ap¬
pears on the screen. It speeds straight at you—watch out! It seems as though it
will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack
full of lacerated flesh and splintered bones, and crushing into dust and into bro¬
ken fragments this hall and this building, so full of women, wine, music and vice.
But this, too, is but a train of shadows.
Noiselessly, the locomotive disappears beyond the edge of the screen. The
train comes to a stop, and grey figures silently emerge from the cars, sound¬
lessly greet their friends, laugh, walk, run, bustle, and . . . are gone. And here
is another picture. Three men seated at the table, playing cards. Their faces are
tense, their hands move swiftly. The cupidity of the players is betrayed by the
trembling fingers and by the twitching of their facial muscles. They play. . . .
Suddenly, they break into laughter, and the waiter who has stopped at their table
with beer, laughs too. They laugh until their sides split but not a sound is heard.
It seems as if these people have died and their shadows have been condemned
to play cards in silence unto eternity. Another picture. A gardener watering flow¬
ers. The light grey stream of water, issuing from a hose, breaks into a fine spray.
It falls upon the flowerbeds and upon the grass blades weighted down by the
water. A boy enters, steps on the hose, and stops the stream. The gardener stares
into the nozzle of the hose, whereupon the boy steps back and a stream of water
hits the gardener in the face. You imagine the spray will reach you, and you want
to shield yourself. But on the screen the gardener has already begun to chase the
rascal all over the garden and having caught him, gives him a beating. But the
beating is soundless, nor can you hear the gurgle of the water as it gushes from
the hose left lying on the ground.
This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as
though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes
your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings in¬
vade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim. . . .
344
Early Days
But suddenly, alongside of you, a gay chatter and a provoking laughter of a
woman is heard . . . and you remember that you are at Aumont’s, Charles Au-
mont’s. . . . But why of all places should this remarkable invention of Lumiere
find its way and be demonstrated here, this invention which affirms once again
the energy and the curiosity of the human mind, forever striving to solve and
grasp all, and . . . while on the way to the solution of the mystery of life, inci¬
dentally builds Aumont’s fortune? I do not yet see the scientific importance of
Lumiere’s invention but, no doubt, it is there, and it could probably be applied
to the general ends of science, that is, of bettering man’s life and the develop¬
ing of his mind. This is not to be found at Aumont’s where vice alone is being
encouraged and popularized. Why then at Aumont’s, among the “victims of so¬
cial needs” and among the loafers who here buy their kisses? Why here, of all
places, are they showing this latest achievement of science? And soon probably
Lumiere’s invention will be perfected, but in the spirit of Aumont-Toulon and
Company.
Besides those pictures I have already mentioned, is featured “The Family
Breakfast,” an idyll of three. A young couple with its chubby first-bom is seated
at the breakfast table. The two are so much in love, and are so charming, gay
and happy, and the baby is so amusing. The picture creates a fine, felicitous im¬
pression. Has this family scene a place at Aumont’s?
And here is still another. Women workers, in a thick, gay and laughing
crowd, rush out of the factory gates into the street. This too is out of place at
Aumont’s. Why remind here of the possibility of a clean, toiling life? This re¬
minder is useless. Under the best of circumstances this picture will only painfully
sting the woman who sells her kisses.
1 am convinced that these pictures will soon be replaced by others of a genre
more suited to the general tone of the “Concert Parisien.” For example, they
will show a picture titled: “As She Undresses,” or “Madam at Her Bath,” or “A
Woman in Stockings.” They could also depict a sordid squabble between a hus¬
band and wife and serve it to the public under the heading of “The Blessings of
Family Life.”
Yes, no doubt, this is how it will be done. The bucolic and the idyll could
not possibly find their place in Russia’s markets thirsting for the piquant and the
extravagant. I also could suggest a few themes for development by means of a
cinematograph and for the amusement of the market place. For instance: to im¬
pale a fashionable parasite upon a picket fence, as is the way of the Turks, pho¬
tograph him, then show it.
It is not exactly piquant but quite edifying.
Leo Tolstoy
345
A Conversation on Film with
Leo Tolstoy
It is difficult to think of Leo Tolstoy (1828—1910) and the cinema as having overlapped;
the movies based on his books, including at least two versions of War and Peace, belong
to the twentieth century of movie stars and elaborate sets; his novels belong to the nine¬
teenth century of long, ruminative stories. Yet Tolstoy not only loved to see movies but
was prescient about the way they would develop as an industry. His image of the
businessman-toad devouring the artist-insect is remarkablefor the way hefinds an opti¬
mistic way to conclude it. This conversation wasfound in an appendix to Kino ,Jay Leyda’s
history of Soviet films.
“You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will
make a revolution in our life—in the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the
old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy
screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have
thought of that and I can feel what is coming.
“But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and
experience—it is much better than the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing
to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transi¬
tions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The
cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness.
“When I was writing ‘The Living Corpse,’ I tore my hair and chewed my fin¬
gers because I could not give enough scenes, enough pictures, because I could
not pass rapidly enough from one event to another. The accursed stage was like
a halter choking the throat of the dramatist; and I had to cut the life and swing
of the work according to the dimensions and requirements of the stage. I re¬
member when I was told that some clever person had devised a scheme for a
revolving stage, on which a number of scenes could be prepared in advance. I
rejoiced like a child, and allowed myself to write ten scenes into my play. Even
then I was afraid the play would be killed.
“But the films! They are wonderful! Drr! and a scene is ready! Drr! and we
have another! We have the sea, the coast, the city, the palace—and in the palace
there is tragedy (there is always tragedy in palaces, as we see in Shakespeare).
“I am seriously thinking of writing a play for the screen. I have a subject for
it. It is a terrible and bloody theme. I am not afraid of bloody themes. Take
3+6
Early Days
Homer or the Bible, for instance. How many bloodthirsty passages there are in
them—murders, wars. And yet these are the sacred books, and they ennoble
and uplift the people. It is not the subject itself that is so terrible. It is the prop¬
agation of bloodshed, and the justification for it, that is really terrible! Some
friends of mine returned from Kursk recently and told me a shocking incident.
It is a story for the films. You couldn’t write it in fiction or for the stage. But
on the screen it would be good. Listen—it may turn out to be a powerful thing!”
And Leo Tolstoy related the story in detail. He was deeply agitated as he
spoke. But he never developed the theme in writing. Tolstoy was always like
that. When he was inspired by a story he had been thinking of, he would be¬
come excited by its possibilities. If some one happened to be near by, he would
unfold the plot in all its details. Then he would forget all about it. Once the ges¬
tation was over and his brain-child bom, Tolstoy would seldom bother to write
about it.
Some one spoke of the domination of the films by business men interested
only in profits. “Yes, I know, I’ve been told about that before,” Tolstoy replied.
“The films have fallen into the clutches of business men and art is weeping! But
where aren’t there business men?” And he proceeded to relate one of those de¬
lightful little parables for which he is famous.
“A little while ago I was standing on the banks of our pond. It was noon of a
hot day, and butterflies of all colours and sizes were circling around, bathing and
darting in the sunlight, fluttering among the flowers through their short—their
very short—lives, for with the setting of the sun they would die.
“But there on the shore near the reeds I saw an insect with little lavender spots
on its wings. It, too, was circling around. It would flutter about, obstinately,
and its circles became smaller and smaller. I glanced over there. In among the
reeds sat a great green toad with staring eyes on each side of his flat head,
breathing quickly with his greenish-white, glistening throat. The toad did not
look at the butterfly, but the butterfly kept flying over him as though she wished
to be seen. What happened? The toad looked up, opened his mouth wide and—
remarkable!—the butterfly flew in of her own accord! The toad snapped his jaws
shut quickly, and the butterfly disappeared.
“Then I remembered that thus the insect reaches the stomach of the toad,
leaves its seed there to develop and again appear on God’s earth, become a larva,
a chrysalis. The chrysalis becomes a caterpillar, and out of the caterpillar springs
a new butterfly. And then the playing in the sun, the bathing in the light, and
the creating of new life, begin all over again.
“Thus it is with the cinema. In the reeds of film art sits the toad—the busi¬
ness man. Above him hovers the insect—the artist. A glance, and the jaws of
the business man devour the artist. But that doesn’t mean destruction. It is only
one of the methods of procreation, or propagating the race; in the belly of the
Joseph Medill Patterson
347
business man is carried on the process of impregnation and the development of
the seeds of the future. These seeds will come out on God’s earth and will begin
their beautiful, brilliant lives all over again.”
Joseph Medill
Patteflson
When the movies were first invented, mere spectacle was enough; audiences were aston¬
ished to see movement on the screen. Was there something about film itself that forced it
to extend itself and tell stories? In 1907, when the Saturday Evening Post was itself the
greatest mass medium in American history, the magazine looked curiously at the new
medium. Charting the rise of film from a novelty to a new entertainment medium, the
Post took a pragmatic approach, reporting on the logistics, costs, and audiences.
“The Nickelodeons”
Three years ago there was not a nickelodeon, or five-cent theatre devoted to
moving-picture shows, in America. To-day there are between four and five thou¬
sand running and solvent, and the number is still increasing rapidly. This is the
boom time in the moving-picture business. Everybody is making money—man¬
ufacturers, renters, jobbers, exhibitors. Overproduction looms up as a cer¬
tainty of the near future; but now, as one press-agent said enthusiastically, “this
line is a Klondike.”
The nickelodeon is tapping an entirely new stratum of people, is developing
into theatregoers a section of population that formerly knew and cared little
about the drama as a fact in life. That is why “this line is a Klondike” just at pre¬
sent.
Incredible as it may seem, over two million people on the average attend the
nickelodeons every day of the year, and a third of these are children.
348
Early Days
Let us prove up this estimate. The agent for the biggest firm of film renters
in the country told me that the average expense of running a nickelodeon was
from $i7jto$2ooa week, divided as follows:
Wage of manager $ 2 j
Wage of operator 2 o
Wage of doorman 1 j
Wage of porter or musician 12
Rent of films (two reels changed twice a week) 50
Rent of projecting machine 1 o
Rent of building 40
Music, printing, “campaign contributions,” etc. 1 8
T otal $190
Merely to meet expenses, then, the average nickelodeon must have a weekly
attendance of 4000. This gives all the nickelodeons 16,000,000 a week, or over
2,000,000 a day. Two million people a day are needed before profits can begin,
and the two million are forthcoming. It is a big thing, this new enterprise.
The nickelodeon is usually a tiny theatre, containing 1 99 seats, giving from
twelve to eighteen performances a day, seven days a week. Its walls are painted
red. The seats are ordinary kitchen chairs, not fastened. The only break in the
red color scheme is made by half a dozen signs, in black and white,
NO SMOKING
HATS OFF
and sometimes, but not always,
STAY AS LONG
AS YOU LIKE
The spectatorium is one story high, twenty-five feet wide and about seventy
feet deep. Last year or the year before it was probably a second-hand clothier’s,
a pawnshop or cigar store. Now, the counter has been ripped out, there is a
ticket-seller’s booth where the show-window was, an automatic musical barker
somewhere up in the air thunders its noise down on the passersby, and the
little store has been converted into a theatrelet. Not a theatre, mind you, for
theatres must take out theatrical licenses at $500 a year. Theatres seat two hun¬
dred or more people. Nickelodeons seat 199, and take out amusement licenses.
This is the general rule.
But sometimes nickelodeon proprietors in favorable locations take out the¬
atrical licenses and put in 800 or 1000 seats. In Philadelphia there is, perhaps,
Joseph M edill Patterson
349
the largest nickelodeon in America. It is said to pay not only the theatrical li¬
cense, but also $30,000 a year ground rent and a handsome profit.
To-day there is cutthroat competition between the little nickelodeon own¬
ers, and they are beginning to compete each other out of existence. Already con¬
solidation has set in. Film-renting firms are quietly beginning to pick up, here
and there, a few nickelodeons of their own; presumably they will make better
rates and give prompter service to their own theatrelets than to those belong¬
ing to outsiders. The tendency is clearly toward fewer, bigger, cleaner five-cent
theatres and more expensive shows. Hard as this may be on the little showman
who is forced out, it is good for the public, who will, in consequence, get more
for their money.
The character of the attendance varies with the locality, but, whatever the lo¬
cality, children make up about thirty-three per cent of the crowds. For some
reason, young women from sixteen to thirty years old are rarely in evidence,
but many middle-aged and old women are steady patrons, who never, when a
new film is to be shown, miss the opening.
In cosmopolitan city districts the foreigners attend in larger proportion than
the English-speakers. This is doubtless because the foreigners, shut out as they
are by their alien tongues from much of the life about them, can yet perfectly
understand the pantomime of the moving pictures.
As might be expected, the Latin races patronize the shows more consistently
than Jews, Irish or Americans. Sailors of all races are devotees.
Most of the shows have musical accompaniments. The enterprising manager
usually engages a human pianist with instructions to play Eliza-crossing-the-ice
when the scene is shuddery, and fast ragtime in a comic kid chase. Where there
is little competition, however, the manager merely presses the button and starts
the automatic going, which is as apt as not to bellow out, I’d Rather Two-Step
Than Waltz, Bill, just as the angel rises from the brave little hero-cripple’s
corpse.
The moving pictures were used as chasers in vaudeville houses for several
years before the advent of the nickelodeon. The cinematograph or vitagraph or
biograph or kinetoscope (there are seventy-odd names for the same machine)
was invented in 1888—1889. Mr- Edison is said to have contributed most toward
it, though several other inventors claim part of the credit.
The first very successful pictures were those o f the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight
at Carson City, Nevada, in 1897. These films were shown all over the country
to immense crowds and an enormous sum of money was made by the exhibitors.
The Jeffries-Sharkey fight of twenty-five rounds at Coney Island, in Novem¬
ber, 1899, was another popular success. The contest being at night, artificial light
350 Early Days
was necessary, and 500 arc lamps were placed above the ring. Four cameras were
used. While one was snapping the fighters, a second was being focused at them,
a third was being reloaded, and a fourth was held in reserve in case of break¬
down. Over seven miles of film were exposed and 198,000 pictures, each 2 by
3 inches, were taken. This fight was taken at the rate of thirty pictures to the
second.
The 500 arc lamps above the ring generated a temperature of about 11 5 de¬
grees for the gladiators to fight in. When the event was concluded, Mr. Jeffries
was overheard to remark that for no amount of money would he ever again in
his life fight in such heat, pictures or no pictures. And he never has.
Since that mighty fight, manufacturers have learned a good deal about cheap¬
ening their process. Pictures instead of being 2 by 3 inches are now 5/8 by 1
1 / 8 inches, and are taken sixteen instead of thirty to the second, for the illusion
to the eye of continuous motion is as perfect at one rate as the other.
By means of a ratchet each separate picture is made to pause a twentieth of
a second before the magic-lantern lens, throwing an enlargement to life size upon
the screen. Then, while the revolving shutter obscures the lens, one picture is
dropped and another substituted, to make in turn its twentieth of a second dis-
P la y-
The films are, as a rule, exhibited at the rate at which they are taken, though
chase scenes are usually thrown faster, and horse races, fire-engines and fast-
moving automobiles slower, than the life-speed.
Within the past year an automatic process to color films has been discovered by
a French firm. The pigments are applied by means of a four-color machine sten¬
cil. Beyond this bare fact, the process remains a secret of the inventors. The sten¬
cil must do its work with extraordinary accuracy, for any minute error in the
application of color to outline made upon the 5/8 by 1 1/8 inches print is mag¬
nified 200 times when thrown upon the screen by the magnifying lens. The re¬
markable thing about this automatic colorer is that it applies the pigment in
slightly different outline to each successive print of a film 700 feet long. Col¬
ored films sell for about fifty per cent more than black and whites. Tinted
films—browns, blues, oranges, violets, greens and so forth—are made by wash¬
ing, and sell at but one per cent over the straight price.
The films are obtained in various ways. “Straight” shows, where the interest
depends on the dramatist’s imagination and the setting, are merely playlets
acted out before the rapid-fire camera. Each manufacturing firm owns a studio
with property-room, dressing-rooms and a completely-equipped stage. The ac¬
tors are experienced professionals of just below the first rank, who are content
to make from $18 to 825a week. In France a class of moving-picture special-
Joseph Med i 11 Patterson
35i
ists has grown up who work only for the cameras, but in this country most of
the artists who play in the film studios in the daytime play also behind the foot¬
lights at night.
The studio manager orders rehearsals continued until his people have their
parts “face-perfect,” then he gives the word, the lens is focused, the cast works
rapidly for twenty minutes while the long strip of celluloid whirs through the
camera, and the performance is preserved in living, dynamic embalmment (if
the phrase may be permitted) for decades to come.
Eccentric scenes, such as a chalk marking the outlines of a coat upon a piece
of cloth, the scissors cutting to the lines, the needle sewing, all automatically
without human help, often require a week to take. The process is ingenious. First
the scissors and chalk are laid upon the edge of the cloth. The picture is taken.
The camera is stopped, the scissors are moved a quarter of an inch into the cloth,
the chalk is drawn a quarter of an inch over the cloth. The camera is opened again
and another picture is taken showing the quarter-inch cut and quarter-inch
mark. The camera is closed, another quarter inch is cut and chalked; another
exposure is made. When these pictures so slowly obtained are run off rapidly,
the illusion of fast self-action on the part of the scissors, chalk and needle is pro¬
duced .
Sometimes in a nickelodeon you can see on the screen a building completely
wrecked in five minutes. Such a film was obtained by focusing a camera at the
building, and taking every salient move of the wreckers for the space, perhaps,
of a fortnight. When these separate prints, obtained at varying intervals, some
of them perhaps a whole day apart, are run together continuously, the appear¬
ance is of a mighty stone building being pulled to pieces like a house of blocks.
Such eccentric pictures were in high demand a couple of years ago, but now
the straight-story show is running them out. The plots are improving every year
in dramatic technique. Manufacturing firms pay from to $2j for good sto¬
ries suitable for film presentation, and it is astonishing how many sound dramatic
ideas are submitted by people of insufficient education to render their thoughts
into English suitable for the legitimate stage.
The moving-picture actors are becoming excellent pantomimists, which is
natural, for they cannot rely on the playwright’s lines to make their meanings.
I remember particularly a performance I saw near Spring Street on the Bowery,
where the pantomime seemed to me in nowise inferior to that of Mademoiselle
Pilar-Morin, the French pantomimist.
The nickelodeon spectators readily distinguish between good and bad acting,
though they do not mark their pleasure or displeasure audibly, except very
rarely, in a comedy scene, by a suppressed giggle. During the excellent show of
which I have spoken, the men, women and children maintained a steady stare
of fascination at the changing figures on the scene, and toward the climax, when
3 J 2 Early Days
forgiveness was cruelly denied, lips were parted and eyes filled with tears. 11 was
as much a tribute to the actors as the loudest bravos ever shouted in the Met¬
ropolitan Opera House.
To-day a consistent plot is demanded. There must be, as in the drama, ex¬
position, development, climax and denouement. The most popular films run
from fifteen to twenty minutes and are from five hundred to eight hundred feet
long. One studio manager said: “The people want a story. We run to comics
generally; they seem to take best. So-and-so, however, lean more to melodrama.
When we started we used to give just flashes—an engine chasing to a fire, a base-
runner sliding home, a charge of cavalry. Now, for instance, if we want to work
in a horse race it has to be as a scene in the life of the jockey, who is the hero of
the piece—we’ve got to give them a story; they won’t take anything else—a
story with plenty of action. You can’t show large conversation, you know, on
the screen. More story, larger story, better story with plenty of action—that is
our tendency.”
Civilization, all through the history of mankind, has been chiefly the property
of the upper classes, but during the past century civilization has been permeat¬
ing steadily downward. The leaders of this democratic movement have been gen¬
eral education, universal suffrage, cheap periodicals and cheap travel. To-day
the moving-picture machine cannot be overlooked as an effective protagonist
of democracy. For through it the drama, always a big fact in the lives of the peo¬
ple at the top, is now becoming a big fact in the lives of the people at the bot¬
tom. Two million of them a day have so found a new interest in life.
The prosperous Westerners, who take their week or fortnight, fall and spring,
in New York, pay two dollars and a half for a seat at a problem play, a melo¬
drama, a comedy or a show-girl show in a Broadway theatre. The stokers who
have driven the Deutschland or the Lusitania from Europe pay five cents for a
seat at a problem play, a melodrama, a comedy or a show-girl show in a Bow¬
ery nickelodeon. What is the difference?
The stokers, sitting on the hard, wooden chairs of the nickelodeon, experi¬
ence the same emotional flux and counter-flux (more intense is their experi¬
ence, for they are not as blase) as the prosperous Westerners in their red plush
orchestra chairs, uptown.
The sentient life of the half-civilized beings at the bottom has been enlarged
and altered, by the introduction of the dramatic motif, to resemble more closely
the sentient life of the civilized beings at the top.
Take an analogous case. Is aimless travel “beneficial” or not? It is amusing,
certainly; and, therefore, the aristocrats who could afford it have always trav¬
eled aimlessly. But now, says the Democratic Movement, the grand tour shall
Joseph Medill Patterson
353
no longer be restricted to the aristocracy. Jump on the rural trolley-car, Mr.
Workingman, and make a grand tour yourself. Don’t care, Mr. Workingman,
whether it is “beneficial” or not. Do it because it is amusing; just as the aristo¬
crats do.
The film makers cover the whole gamut of dramatic attractions. The extremes
in the film world are as far apart as the extremes in the theatrical world—as far
apart, let us say, as The Master Builder and The Gay White Way.
If you look up the moving-picture advertisements in any vaudeville trade
paper you cannot help being struck with this fact. For instance, in a current num¬
ber, one firm offers the following variety of attractions:
Romany’s Revenge (very dramatic)
300
feet
Johnny’s Run (comic kid chase)
300
n
Roof to Cellar (absorbing comedy)
782
*
Wizard’s World (fantastic comedy)
35 °
n
Sailor’s Return (highly dramatic)
535
n
A Mother’s Sin (beautiful, dramatic and moral)
392
n
Knight Errant (old historical drama)
421
"
Village Fire Brigade (big laugh)
325
Catch the Kid (a scream)
270
"
The Coroner’s Mistake (comic ghost story)
430
"
Fatal Hand (dramatic)
432
Another firm advertises in huge type, in the trade papers:
LIFE AND PASSION OF CHRIST
Five Parts, Thirty-nine Pictures,
3ii4feet Price, $373.68
Extra for coloring 125.10
The presentation by the picture machines of the Passion Play in this country
was undertaken with considerable hesitation. The films had been shown in
France to huge crowds, but here, so little were even professional students of
American lower-class taste able to gauge it in advance, that the presenters feared
the Passion Play might be boycotted, if not, indeed, in some places, mobbed.
On the contrary, it has been the biggest success ever known to the business.
Last year incidents leading up to the murder of Stanford White were shown,
succeeded enormously for a very few weeks, then flattened out completely and
were withdrawn. Film people are as much at sea about what their crowds will
like as the managers in the “legitimate.”
3S4
Early Days
Although the gourdlike growth of the nickelodeon business as a factor i n the
conscious life of Americans is not yet appreciated, already a good many people
are disturbed by what they do know of the thing.
Those who are “interested in the poor” are wondering whether the five-cent
theatre is a good influence, and asking themselves gravely whether it should be
encouraged or checked (with the help of the police).
Is the theatre a “good” or a “bad” influence? The adjectives don’t fit the case.
Neither do they fit the case of the nickelodeon, which is merely the theatre de¬
mocratized .
Take the case of the Passion Play, for instance. Is it irreverent to portray the
Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension in a vaudeville theatre over a
darkened stage where half an hour before a couple of painted, short-skirted girls
were doing a “sister-act”? What is the motive which draws crowds of poor peo¬
ple to nickelodeons to see the Birth in the Manger flashed magic-lantemwise
upon a white cloth? Curiosity? Mere mocking curiosity, perhaps? I cannot an¬
swer.
Neither could I say what it is that, every fifth year, draws our plutocrats to
Oberammergau, where at the cost, from first to last, of thousands of dollars and
days of time, they view a similar spectacle presented in a sunny Bavarian set¬
ting.
It is reasonable, however, to believe that the same feelings, whatever they
are, which drew our rich to Oberammergau draw our poor to the nickelodeons.
Whether the powerful emotional reactions produced in the spectator by the Pas¬
sion Play are “beneficial” or not is as far beyond decision as the question whether
a man or an oyster is happier. The man is more, feels more, than the oyster.
The beholder of the Passion Play is more, feels more, than the non-beholder.
Whether for weal or woe, humanity has ceaselessly striven to complicate life,
to diversify and make subtle the emotions, to create and gratify the new and ar¬
tificial spiritual wants, to know more and feel more both of good and evil, to
attain a greater degree of self-consciousness; just as the one fundamental instinct
of the youth, which most systems of education have been vainly organized to
eradicate, is to find out what the man knows.
In this eternal struggle for more self-consciousness, the moving-picture ma¬
chine, uncouth instrument though it be, has enlisted itself on especial behalf of
the least enlightened, those who are below the reach even of the yellow jour¬
nals. For although in the prosperous vaudeville houses the machine is but a toy,
a “chaser,” in the nickelodeons it is the central, absorbing fact, which strength¬
ens, widens, vivifies subjective life; which teaches living other than living through
the senses alone. Already, perhaps, touching him at the psychological moment,
it has awakened to his first, groping, necessary discontent the spirit of an artist
of the future, who otherwise would have remained mute and motionless.
V a c he 1 Linds ay
35J
The nickelodeons are merely an extension course in civilization, teaching both
its “badness” and its “goodness.” They have come in obedience to the law of sup¬
ply and demand; and they will stay as long as the slums stay, for in the slums
they are the fittest and must survive.
Vachel Lindsay
Writing at the dawn of the cinema, in 1915, thepoet Vachel Lindsay (l 870—1931) sup¬
plies a description of the action genre, in which thefundamental outlines were already so
firmly established that he could be describing an action film of the 1990s.
“The Photoplay of Action”
Let us assume, friendly reader, that it is eight o’clock in the evening when you
make yourself comfortable in your den, to peruse this chapter. I want to tell
you about the Action Film, the simplest, the type most often seen. In the mind
of the habitue of the cheaper theatre it is the only sort in existence. It dominates
the slums, is announced there by red and green posters of the melodrama sort,
and retains its original elements, more deftly handled, in places more expen¬
sive. The story goes at the highest possible speed to be still credible. When it is
a poor thing, which is the case too often, the St. Vitus dance destroys the
pleasure-value. The rhythmic quality of the picture-motions is twitched to
death. In the bad photoplay even the picture of an express train more than ex¬
aggerates itself. Yet when the photoplay chooses to behave it can reproduce a
race far more joyously than the stage. On that fact is based the opportunity of
this form. Many Action Pictures are indoors, but the abstract theory of the Ac¬
tion Film is based on the out-of-door chase. You remember the first one you
saw where the policeman pursues the comical tramp over hill and dale and
across the town lots. You remember that other where the cowboy follows the
horse thief across the desert, spies him at last and chases him faster, faster, faster,
}j6 Early Days
and faster, and finally catches him. If the film was made in the days before the
National Board of Censorship, it ends with the cowboy cheerfully hanging the
villain; all details given to the last kick of the deceased.
One of the best Action Pictures is an old Griffith Biograph, recently reissued,
the story entitled “Man’s Genesis.” In the time when cave-men-gorillas had no
weapons, Weak-Hands (impersonated by Robert Harron) invents the stone
club. He vanquishes his gorilla-like rival, Brute-Force (impersonated by Wil¬
fred Lucas). Strange but credible manners and customs of the cave-men are
detailed. They live in picturesque caves. Their half-monkey gestures are won¬
derful to see. But these things are beheld on the fly. It is the chronicle of a race
between the brain of Weak-Hands and the body of the other, symbolized by the
chasing of poor Weak-Hands in and out among the rocks until the climax. Brain
desperately triumphs. Weak-Hands slays Brute-Force with the startling inven¬
tion. He wins back his stolen bride, Lily-White (impersonated by Mae Marsh).
It is a Griffith masterpiece, and every actor does sound work. The audience,
mechanical Americans, fond of crawling on their stomachs to tinker their au¬
tomobiles, are eager over the evolution of the first weapon from a stick to a
hammer. They are as full of curiosity as they could well be over the history of
Langley or the Wright brothers.
The dire perils of the motion pictures provoke the ingenuity of the audience,
not their passionate sympathy. When, in the minds of the deluded producers,
the beholders should be weeping or sighing with desire, they are prophesying
the next step to one another in worldly George Ade slang. This is illustrated in
another good Action Photoplay: the dramatization of The Spoilers. The origi¬
nal novel was written by Rex Beach. The gallant William Famum as Glenister
dominates the play. He has excellent support. Their team-work makes them
worthy of chronicle: Thomas Santschi as McNamara, Kathlyn Williams as Cherry
Malotte, Bessie Eyton as Helen Chester, Frank Clark as Dextry, Wheeler Oak-
man as Bronco Kid, and Jack McDonald as Slapjack.
There are, in The Spoilers, inspiriting ocean scenes and mountain views.
There are interesting sketches of mining-camp manners and customs. There is
a well-acted love-interest in it, and the element of the comradeship of loyal pals.
But the chase rushes past these things to the climax, as in a policeman picture it
whirls past blossoming gardens and front lawns till the tramp is arrested. The
difficulties are commented on by the people in the audience as rah-rah boys on
the side lines comment on hurdles cleared or knocked over by the men running
in college field-day. The sudden cut-backs into side branches of the story are
but hurdles also, not plot complications in the stage sense. This is as it should
be. The pursuit progresses without St. Vitus dance or hysteria to the end of the
film. There the spoilers are discomfited, the gold mine is recaptured, the inci¬
dental girls are won, in a flash, by the rightful owners.
Va ch el Lindsay
3 S' 7
These shows work like the express elevators in the Metropolitan Tower. The
ideal is the maximum of speed in descending or ascending, not to be jolted into
insensibility. There are two girl parts as beautifully thought out as the parts of
ladies in love can be expected to be in Action Films. But in the end the love is
not much more romantic in the eye of the spectator than it would be to behold
a man on a motorcycle with the girl of his choice riding on the same machine
behind him. And the highest type of Action Picture romance is not attained by
having Juliet triumph over the motorcycle handicap. It is not achieved by weav¬
ing in a Sherlock Holmes plot. Action Picture romance comes when each hur¬
dle is a tableau, when there is indeed an art-gallery-beauty in each one of these
swift glimpses: when it is a race, but with a proper and golden-linked grace from
action to action, and the goal is the most beautiful glimpse in the whole reel.
In the Action Picture there is no adequate means for the development of any
full grown personal passion. The distinguished character-study that makes gen¬
uine the personal emotions in the legitimate drama, has no chance. People are
but types, swiftly moved chessmen. . . . But here, briefly: the Action Pictures
are falsely advertised as having heart-interest, or abounding in tragedy. But
though the actors glower and wrestle and even if they are the most skilful 1am-
basters in the profession, the audience gossips and chews gum.
Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay if neither lust,
love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed? Simply because such spectacles
gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every American.
To make the elevator go faster than the one in the Metropolitan Tower is to
destroy even this emotion. To elaborate unduly any of the agonies or seductions
in the hope of arousing lust, love, hate, or hunger, is to produce on the screen
a series of misplaced Figures of the order Frankenstein.
How often we have been horrified by these galvanized and ogling corpses.
These are the things that cause the outcry for more censors. It is not that our
moral codes are insulted, but what is far worse, our nervous systems are tem¬
porarily racked to pieces. These wriggling half-dead men, these over-bloody bur¬
glars, are public nuisances, no worse and no better than dead cats being hurled
about by street urchins.
The cry for more censors is but the cry for the man with the broom. Some¬
times it is a matter as simple as when a child is scratching with a pin on a slate.
While one would not have the child locked up by the chief of police, after Five
minutes of it almost every one wants to smack him till his little jaws ache. It is
the very cold-bloodedness of the proceeding that ruins our kindness of heart.
And the best Action Film is impersonal and unsympathetic even if it has no
scratching pins. Because it is cold-blooded it must take extra pains to be tact¬
ful. Cold-blooded means that the hero as we see him on the screen is a variety
of amiable or violent ghost. Nothing makes his lack of human charm plainer than
358
Early Days
when we as audience enter the theatre at the middle of what purports to b e the
most passionate of scenes when the goal of the chase is unknown to us and the
alleged “situation” appeals on its magnetic merits. Here is neither the psychic
telepathy of Forbes Robertson’s Caesar, nor the fire-breath of E. H. Sothem’s
Don Quixote. The audience is not worked up into the deadly still mob-unity of
the speaking theatre. We late comers wait for the whole reel to start over and
the goal to be indicated in the preliminary, before we can get the least bit
wrought up. The prize may be a lady’s heart, the restoration of a lost reputa¬
tion, or the ownership of the patent for a chum. In the more effective Action
Plays it is often what would be secondary on the stage, the recovery of a certain
glove, spade, bull-calf, or rock-quarry. And to begin, we are shown a clean-cut
picture of said glove, spade, bull-calf, or rock-quarry. Then when these disap¬
pear from ownership or sight, the suspense continues till they are again visible
on the screen in the hands of the rightful owner.
In brief, the actors hurry through what would be tremendous passions on the
stage to recover something that can be really photographed. For instance, there
came to our town long ago a film of a fight between Federals and Confederates,
with the loss of many lives, all for the recapture of a steam-engine that took on
more personality in the end than private or general on either side, alive or dead.
It was based on the history of the very engine photographed, or else that engine
was given in replica. The old locomotive was full of character and humor amidst
the tragedy, leaking steam at every orifice. The original is in one of the South¬
ern Civil War museums. This engine in its capacity as a principal actor is going
to be referred to more than several times in this work.
The highest type of Action Picture gives us neither the quality of Macbeth or
Henry Fifth, the Comedy of Errors, or the Taming of the Shrew. It gives us rather
that fine and special quality that was in the ink-bottle of Robert Louis Steven¬
son, that brought about the limitations and the nobility of the stories of Kid¬
napped, Treasure Island, and the New Arabian Nights. . . .
Having read thus far, why not close the book and go round the comer to a
photoplay theatre? Give the preference to the cheapest one. The Action Picture
will be inevitable. Since this chapter was written, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks
have given complete department store examples of the method, especially Chaplin in the
brilliantly constructed Shoulder Arms, and Fairbanks in his one great piece of acting, in
The Three Musketeers.
Charlie Chaplin
359
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin arrives in Los Angeles, finds a job, and creates history. It was all so sim¬
ple, the way Chaplin describes it. He was hanging around Mack Sennett’s set, hoping to
catch his eye, and when Sennett told him, “We need some gags here,’’ Chaplin went to
wardrobe and emerged as .. . the Little Tramp, the most famous character in the first
fifty years offilm. It was a matter of the right clothes and makeup, Chaplin seems to be¬
lieve: "By the time 1 walked on to the stage he wasfully horn" Of course inspiration could
strike like that when the movies were young and you needed a gag, fast. Today six studio
executives wouldfeel it necessary to improve the Little Tramp with their input.
from My Autobiography
Eager and anxious, I arrived in Los Angeles and took a room at a small hotel,
the Great Northern. The first evening I took a busman’s holiday and saw the
second show at the Empress, where the Kamo Company had worked. The at¬
tendant recognized me and came a few moments later to tell me that Mr. Sen¬
nett and Miss Mabel Normand were sitting two rows back and had asked if I
would join them. I was thrilled, and after a hurried, whispered introduction we
all watched the show together. When it was over, we walked a few paces down
Main Street, and went to a rathskeller for a light supper and a drink. Mr. Sen¬
nett was shocked to see how young I looked. “I thought you were a much older
man,” he said. I could detect a tinge of concern, which made me anxious, re¬
membering that all Sennett’s comedians were oldish-looking men. Fred Mace
was over fifty and Ford Sterling in his forties. “I can make up as old as you like,”
I answered. Mabel Normand, however, was more reassuring. Whatever her
reservations were about me, she did not reveal them. Mr. Sennett said that I
would not start immediately, but should come to the studio in Edendale and get
acquainted with the people. When we left the cafe, we bundled into Mr. Sen¬
nett’s glamorous racing car and I was driven to my hotel.
360
Early Days
The following morning I boarded a street-car for Edendale, a suburb of Los
Angeles. It was an anomalous-looking place that could not make up its mind
whether to be a humble residential district or a semi-industrial one. It had small
lumber-yards and junk-yards, and abandoned-looking small farms on which
were built one or two shacky wooden stores that fronted the road. After many
enquiries I found myself opposite the Keystone Studio. It was a dilapidated af¬
fair with a green fence round it, one hundred and fifty feet square. The entrance
to it was up a garden path through an old bungalow—the whole place looked
just as anomalous as Edendale itself. I stood gazing at it from the opposite side
of the road, debating whether to go in or not.
It was lunch-time and I watched the men and women in their make-up come
pouring out of the bungalow, including the Keystone Cops. They crossed the
road to a small general store and came out eating sandwiches and hot dogs. Some
called after each other in loud, raucous voices: “Hey, Hank, come on!” “Tell Slim
to hurry!”
Suddenly I was seized with shyness and walked quickly to the corner at a safe
distance, looking to see if Mr. Sennett or Miss Normand would come out of the
bungalow, but they did not appear. For half an hour I stood there, then decided
to go back to the hotel. The problem of entering the studio and facing all those
people became an insuperable one. For two days I arrived outside the studio,
but I had not the courage to go in. The third day Mr. Sennett telephoned and
wanted to know why I had not shown up. I made some sort of excuse. “Come
down right away, we’ll be waiting for you,” he said. So I went down and boldly
marched into the bungalow and asked for Mr. Sennett.
He was pleased to see me and took me immediately into the studio. I was en¬
thralled. A soft even light pervaded the whole stage. It came from broad streams
of white linen that diffused the sun and gave an ethereal quality to everything.
This diffusion was for photographing in daylight.
After being introduced to one or two actors I became interested in what was
going on. There were three sets side by side, and three comedy companies were
at work in them. It was like viewing something at the World’s Fair. In one set
Mabel Normand was banging on a door shouting: “Let me in!” Then the cam¬
era stopped and that was it—I had no idea films were made piecemeal in this
fashion.
On another set was the great Ford Sterling whom I was to replace. Mr. Sen¬
nett introduced me to him. Ford was leaving Keystone to form his own company
with Universal. He was immensely popular with the public and with everyone
in the studio. They surrounded his set and were laughing eagerly at him.
Sennett took me aside and explained their method of working. “We have no
scenario—we get an idea then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads
up to a chase, which is the essence of our comedy.”
Charlie Chaplin
36
This method was edifying, but personally I hated a chase. It dissipates one’s
personality; little as I knew about movies, I knew that nothing transcended per¬
sonality.
That day I went from set to set watching the companies at work. They all
seemed to be imitating Ford Sterling. This worried me, because his style did not
suit me. He played a harassed Dutchman, ad-libbing through the scene with a
Dutch accent, which was funny but was lost in silent pictures. I wondered what
Sennett expected of me. He had seen my work and must have known that I was
not suitable to play Ford’s type of comedy; my style was just the opposite. Yet
every story and situation conceived in the studio was consciously or uncon¬
sciously made f or Sterling; even Roscoe Arbuckle was imitating Sterling.
The studio had evidently been a farm. Mabel Normand’s dressing-room was
situated in an old bungalow and adjoining it was another room where the ladies
of the stock company dressed. Across from the bungalow was what had evidently
been a bam, the main dressing-room for minor members of the stock company
and the Keystone Cops, the majority of whom were ex-circus clowns and prize¬
fighters. I was allotted the star dressing-room used by Mack Sennett, Ford Ster¬
ling and Roscoe Arbuckle. It was another barn-like structure which might have
been the harness-room. Besides Mabel Normand, there were several other
beautiful girls. It was a strange and unique atmosphere of beauty and beast.
For days I wandered around the studio, wondering when I would start work.
Occasionally I would meet Sennett crossing the stage, but he would look through
me, preoccupied. I had an uncomfortable feeling that he thought he had made
a mistake in engaging me which did little to ameliorate my nervous tension.
Each day my peace of mind depended on Sennett. If perchance he saw me
and smiled, my hopes would rise. The rest of the company had a wait-and-see
attitude but some, I felt, considered me a doubtful substitute for Ford Sterling.
When Saturday came Sennett was most amiable. Said he: “Go to the front
office and get your cheque.” I told him I was more anxious to get to work. I
wanted to talk about imitating Ford Sterling, but he dismissed me with the re¬
mark: “Don’t worry, we’ll get round to that.”
Nine days of inactivity had passed and the tension was excruciating. Ford,
however, would console me and after work he would occasionally give me a lift
down-town, where we would stop in at the Alexandria Bar for a drink and meet
several of his friends. One of them, a Mr. Elmer Ellsworth; whom I disliked at
first and thought rather crass, would jokingly taunt me: “I understand you’re
taking Ford’s place. Well, are you funny?”
“Modesty forbids,” I said squirmishly. This sort of ribbing was most embar¬
rassing, especially in the presence of Ford. But he graciously took me off the
hook with a remark. “Didn’t you catch him at the Empress playing the drunk?
Very funny.”
362
Early Days
“Well, he hasn’t made me laugh yet,” said Ellsworth.
He was a big, cumbersome man, and looked glandular, with a melancholy,
hangdog expression, hairless face, sad eyes, a loose mouth and a smile that
showed two missing front teeth. Ford whispered impressively that he was a great
authority on literature, finance and politics, one of the best-informed men in
the country, and that he had a great sense of humour. However I did not ap¬
preciate it and would try to avoid him. But one night at the Alexandria bar, he
said: “Hasn’t this limey got started yet?”
“Not yet,” I laughed uncomfortably.
“Well, you’d better be funny.”
Having taken a great deal from the gentleman, I gave him back some of his
own medicine: “Well, if I’m half as funny as you look, I’ll do all right.”
“Blimey! A sarcastic wit, eh? I’ll buy him a drink after that.”
Djuna Barnes
John Bunny (l 863— 1 9 15) died ojBright’s disease one month after conducting this haunt¬
ing interview with the writer and bohemian legend Djuna Barnes (l 892—1982). Did he
already know he was ill? He seems preoccupied with how he will be remembered after he
is dead and reassures himself thatJilm will grant him immortality. And so it has, but only
among the handful of silent comedy lovers who know who he was. IJirst read this piece at
about the same time John Candy died, and wasJilled with r flection.
John Bunny
Having pieced together necessities of the soul and the humor that gets past with
the solemnity that holds the two down to earth as ballast, and having attained
with the piecing a weight nearing the 300 mark, John Bunny, moving picture
actor and little friend to the thin, looks at you out of prolonged almond eyes
wherein is the shadow of the veil drawn aside, and a great sadness that seldom
reaches his public.
Dj u n a Barnes
363
Ask him what his nationality is and he will answer half-and-half, as though he
were ordering a drink; ask him half of what and half of what again, and he will
smile, “Half English, half Irish,’’and then ask him what he thinks of the Irish and
he will answer, “Now, start something.”
For half-an-hour I walked in John Bunny’s footsteps, for he always walks
ahead, and you must of necessity amble slowly behind, like a dog at the heels of
a star.
Over his short, sandy hair he wears a cap of a check diminutive; over his ster¬
num bone a shirt of a stripe majestic, and over the insteps of his jaunty, slow-
moving feet the best of canvas not used in the making of the tents of Anthony.
This was the joy of the screen with the screen folded and laid aside, so I gripped
him by the hand and looked into the face called funny, and wondered to see the
mouth drawn down into the lines of slack net, sadly unfulfilling the purposes of
its mesh.
“Humor,” I said, “where art thou—as you live for us in the moving picture
house?”
“No,” he said, “I am not a humorous man. Many think I must be to get away
with my laughs, but it is not because of my size nor because of my face that I
have made my life a success; it is because I have intelligence. You can’t make
everyone understand that; nevertheless, it is the case. If I were merely funny
and pounds I would have gone down at five-per day ages ago. It is the intelli¬
gence, the brain behind the mass, that makes the populace proclaim and desire.
Twenty-six years I’ve been acting, everything from Shakespeare to a clown; Nick
Bottom with Annie Russell to a darn fool with Hitchcock, and I found that it
didn’t pay.
“Have you ever realized,” Bunny continued, in that slow drawl that some¬
times broke into a lisp and sometimes into a deep, throaty chuckle, “that actors
are merely public toys, playthings for the people to handle and grow tired of,
toys that amuse for a time, toys that lure with the brightness of their paint, to
be patronized just so long as the paint is new and bright and attractive, dropped
and forgotten when it is worn off and the toy is broken and old? Dead, never to
be resurrected; discarded and thrown aside for a toy more amply shaded with
varnish and crimson, forgotten for a new face, a newer, larger smile, a greater
capacity for tears. Who of us ever thinks of Booth? Who of us ever mentions
Irving?
“Did you ever stop to think that if some ill-disposed person were to throw
vitriol into this funny face that the thousands who had rocked with laughter would
turn away and forget all the laughs and hours of merriment, would turn me loose
into the realm of the great forgotten; that is, if I had remained an actor of the
legitimate stage.
“But I have chosen a better thing. I shall live longer than Irving and Booth,
364 Early Days
not because I deserve to, but because there is a record of me that they did not
leave; the public can have me always the same, so long as the pictures are pre¬
served. To be remembered. To be remembered the feet must move. It is the
single photograph that gets put away, but throw me on the screen when I ’ m only
ashes and the people will respond the way they have always responded. Indeed,
I would wager that they would rise up and become enthusiastic toward a dead
comedy actor who, in pictures, went right on amusing them with overcountry
rides in pursuit of a runaway daughter. It has a tang of the game in it. Most dead
people are dead for a long while, but the moving picture actor goes right on liv¬
ing and loving and laughing and walking, even if he is languidly strumming upon
a stringed instrument in another world.
“Oh, don’t tell me,” Bunny added, wiping his brow, “that the moving pic¬
ture actor hasn’t got it over the regular actor fifty ways. Why, in the mere mat¬
ter of rehearsing and touring, every well-known actor has had to go on the road,
has had to foot traveling bills, has had to listen to the temper which is called tem¬
perament of his leading lady, and has to listen to the railing of the stage man¬
ager, who is nothing but a clerk out front. He is denied his home, his church,
his club. He subjects himself to all sorts of things that the moving picture actor
never knows about, and wouldn’t want to know, and in the end the play may
be a failure. And he doesn’t get the big pay that a moving picture actor gets. I
get $50,000 a year. How many other legitimate actors get that?”
“But,” I interrupted, “moving picture actors are looked down upon by the le¬
gitimate actors, are they not?”
“Once,” he said, “the regular actor shunned us, until one day, looking to the
cause of their slackness of trade, they saw us. Since then they have not crossed
to the other side of the street.
“Y et the moving pictures will never take the place of the stage. They are sim¬
ply a new kind of amusement. Moving pictures give you only two sides of a room,
and out of your own imagination you supply the roof and the other sides. You
make the actors talk. Y ou are proud of the moving picture, yet it is not the mov¬
ing pictures that you are proud of at all. It is the amount of yourself that you
have put into them.
“And returning to the attitude of actors and public in general toward a mov¬
ing picture star, I may say that I can pick my friends. Those that Ido not like do
not know me, because I won’t be known. Those that I do not like may speak to
me and receive a civil ‘How do you do?’ but they do not know my house, they
do not read my books, they do not look at my pictures, they don’t know my
dog, they may not take me by the hand and call me comrade. If I dislike a per¬
son I don’t see him, that’s all. There aremany that want to know me that I don’t
want to know. I get hundreds of letters; some of them are very pleasant, all of
them are complimentary, and most of them make a touch for an autographed
Louise Brooks
36 j
picture—which they get only when the letter sounds sincere. People walk up
to me in the street and tell me how I have made their lives a little brighter; peo¬
ple come to me in the cafes and speak of my funny face; others turn about and
look when they do not approach.”
“What is your greatest ambition?” I asked.
“I hope to improve the moving pictures. Just how I don’t want to say, but
they are not nearly as perfect as they should be. I am going to experiment and
try to make them better. Also, I am going to set out some rules for the im¬
provement of the scenarios; they are often very inadequate. If 1 light a few more
matches,” he said irrelevantly, “you will think I buy them by the tree.”
“What do you love more than anything else in the world, Mr. Bunny?”
“Baseball and the sea, and my wife and two boys—and my friends. But, best
of all, set me adrift on a log.” He laughed then and tipped his cap over his only-
pair-of-eyes-in-the-world-like-them.
So let us leave him.
Louise Brooks
Had Louise Brooks stopped making films after she walked out of Paramount Pictures, she
would beforgotten today, except by silent movie buffs. But fate matched her with the Ger¬
man director G. W. Pabst, and with him she did two films — Pandora’s Box and Diary
of a Lost Girl, both in 1929—and they made her a screen immortal. Thefilms retain
their shocking erotic charge, both because of Brooks’s incredibly expressive performances
and because Pabst insisted that every action have a motivation (see Brooks’s discussion of
the differencebetween Griffith’s “giggling virgins’’and Pabst’s). Brooks drifted back to Hol¬
lywood, acted in B pictures, quit Hollywood forever in 1940, and by 1943, she wrote,
found that the only well-paying career open to me, as an unsuccessful actress of thirty-
six, was that of a call girl.’’ (It is typical of Brooks that she deliberately left it unclear
whether she worked at that career.) In 1956 she was persuaded to move to Rochester by
James Card, the curator of the Eastman House film center, and there she began to write
the essays that make up Lulu in Hollywood, one of the wittiest and most truthful books
ever written about the movies.
366 Early Days
“Pabst and Lulu”
Frank Wedekind’s play Pandora’s Box opens with a prologue. Out of a circus tent
steps the Animal Tamer, carrying in his left hand a whip and in his right hand a
loaded revolver. “Walk in,” he says to the audience. “Walk into my menagerie!”
The finest job of casting that G. W. Pabst ever did was casting himself as the di¬
rector, the Animal Tamer, of his film adaptation of Wedekind’s “tragedy of mon¬
sters . ” Never a sentimental trick did this whip hand permit the actors assembled
to play his beasts. The revolver he shot straight into the heart of the audience.
At the time Wedekind produced Pandora's Box, in Berlin around the turn of the
century, it was detested, condemned, and banned. It was declared to be “im¬
moral and inartistic.” If in that period when the sacred pleasures of the ruling
class were comparatively private, a play exposing them had called out the dogs
of law, how much more savage would be the attack upon a film faithful to
Wedekind’s text which was made in 1928 in Berlin, where the ruling class pub¬
licly flaunted its pleasures as a symbol of wealth and power. And since nobody
truly knows what a director is doing till he is done, nobody who was connected
with the film dreamed that Pabst was risking commercial failure with the story
of an “immoral” prostitute who wasn’t crazy about her work and was surrounded
by the “inartistic” ugliness of raw bestiality. Only five years earlier, the famous
Danish actress Asta Nielsen had condensed Wedekind’s play into the film Loulou.
There was no lesbianism in it, no incest. Loulou the man-eater devoured her
sex victims—Dr. Goll, Schwarz, and Schon—and then dropped dead in an
acute attack of indigestion. This kind of film, with Pabst improvements, was what
audiences were prepared for. Set upon making their disillusionment inescapable,
hoping to avoid even any duplication of the straight bob and bangs that Nielsen
had worn as Loulou, Mr. Pabst tested me with my hair curled. But after seeing
the test he gave up this point and left me with my shiny black helmet, except
for one curled sequence on the gambling ship.
Besides daring to film Wedekind’s problem of abnormal psychology—in
Wedekind’s own words, “this fatal destiny which is the subject of the tragedy”—
besides daring to show the prostitute as the victim, Mr. Pabst went on to the
final, damning immorality of making his Lulu as “sweetly innocent” as the flow¬
ers that adorned her costumes and filled the scenes of the play. “Lulu is not a
real character,” Wedekind said in a commentary, “but the personification of
primitive sexuality who inspires evil unaware. She plays a purely passive role.”
In the middle of the prologue, dressed in her boy’s costume of Pierrot, she is
carried by a stage hand before the Animal Tamer, who tells her, “Be unaffected,
and not pieced out with distorted, artificial folly/even if the critics praise you
Louise Brooks
367
for it less wholly./And mind—all foolery and making faces/the childish sim¬
pleness of vice disgraces.” This was the Lulu, when the film was released, whom
the critics praised not less wholly, but not at all. “Louise Brooks cannot act,”
one critic wrote. “She does not suffer. She does nothing.” As far as they were
concerned, Pabst had fired a blank. It was I who was struck down by my fail¬
ure, although he had done everything possible to protect and strengthen me
against this deadly blow. He never allowed me to be publicly identified with the
film after the night, during production, when we appeared as guests at the open¬
ing of an UFA film, at the Gloria Palast. As we left the theatre, and he hurried
me through a crowd of hostile moviegoers, I heard a girl saying something loud
and nasty. In the cab, I began pounding his knee, insisting, “What did she say?
What did she say?” Finally, he translated: “That is the American girl who is play¬
ing our German Lulu!”
In the studio, Pabst, who had a special, pervasive sense that penetrated minds
and walls alike, put down all overt acts of contempt. Although I never com¬
plained, he substituted another assistant for an assistant who woke me out of my
dressing-room naps by beating the door and bellowing, “Fraulein Brooks!
Come!” Sitting on the set day after day, my darling maid, Josifine Muller, who
had worked for Asta Nielsen and thought she was the greatest actress in the
world, came to love me tenderly because I was the world’s worst actress. For
the same reason, the great actor Fritz Kortner, who played Schon, never spoke
to me at all. Using Pabst’s strength, I learned to block off painful impressions.
Kortner, like everybody else on the production, thought I had cast some blind¬
ing spell over Pabst which allowed me to walk through my part. To them, it
was a sorry outcome of Pabst’s difficult search for Lulu, about which one of his
assistants, Paul Falkenberg, said in 19J j, “Preparation for Pandora’s Box was quite
a saga, because Pabst couldn’t find a Lulu. He wasn’t satisfied with any actress
at hand, and for months everybody connected with the production went around
looking for a Lulu. I talked to girls on the street, on the subway, in railway sta¬
tions—‘Would you mind coming up to our office? I would like to present you
to Mr. Pabst.’ He looked all of them over dutifully and turned them all down.
And eventually he picked Louise Brooks.”
How Pabst determined that I was his unaffected Lulu, with the childish sim¬
pleness of vice, was part of a mysterious alliance that seemed to exist between
us even before we met. He knew nothing more of me than an unimportant part
he saw me play in the Howard Hawks film A Girl in Every Port (1928). I had never
heard of him, and had no idea he had made unsuccessful negotiations to borrow
me from Paramount until I was called to the front office on the option day of
my contract. My salary wasn’t going to be increased. B. P. Schulberg told me
that I could stay on at my old salary or quit. It was the time of the switchover
to talkies, and studios were taking ugly advantage of this fact to cut contract play-
}68
Early Days
ers’ salaries. Refusing to take what amounted to a cut, I quit Paramount. Al¬
most as an afterthought, Schulberg told me about the Pabst offer, which I was
now free to accept. I said I would accept it, and he sent off a cable to Pabst. All
this took about ten minutes, and I left Schulberg somewhat dazed by my com¬
posure and my quick decisions.
If I had not acted at once, I would have lost the part of Lulu. At that very
hour in Berlin Marlene Dietrich was waiting with Pabst in his office. Pabst later
said, “Dietrich was too old and too obvious—one sexy look and the picture
would become a burlesque. But I gave her a deadline, and the contract was about
to be signed when Paramount cabled saying I could have Louise Brooks.” It must
be remembered that Pabst was speaking about the pre—Josef-von-Sternberg
Dietrich. She was the Dietrich of / Kiss Your Hand, Madame, a film in which, ca¬
parisoned variously in beads, brocade, ostrich feathers, chiffon ruffles, and white
rabbit fur, she galloped from one lascivious stare to another. Years after another
trick of fate had made her a top star—for Sternberg’s biographer, Herman
Weinberg, told me that it was only because Brigitte Helm was not available that
Sternberg looked further and found Dietrich for The Blue Angel —she said to
Travis Banton, the Paramount dress designer who transformed her spangles and
feathers into glittering, shadowed beauty, “Imagine Pabst choosing Louise Brooks
for Lulu when he could have had me!”
So it is that my playing of the tragic Lulu with no sense of sin remained gen¬
erally unacceptable for a quarter of a century.
Not long ago, after seeing Pandora’s Box at Eastman House, a priest said to
me, “How did you feel, playing— that girl?”
“Feel? I felt fine! It all seemed perfectly normal to me.”
Seeing him start with distaste and disbelief, and unwilling to be mistaken for
one of those women who like to shock priests with sensational confessions, I went
on to prove the truth of Lulu’s world by telling him of my own experience in
the 192 j Ziegfeld Follies, when my best friend was a lesbian and I knew two mil¬
lionaire publishers who, much like Schon in the film, backed shows to keep them¬
selves well supplied with Lulus. But the priest rejected my reality exactly as
Berlin had rejected its reality when we made Pandora’s Box and sex was the busi¬
ness of the town. At the Eden Hotel, where I lived in Berlin, the cafe bar was
lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street out¬
side. On the corner stood the girls in boots, advertising flagellation. Actors’
agents pimped for the ladies in luxury apartments in the Bavarian Quarter.
Race-track touts at the Hoppegarten arranged orgies for groups of sportsmen.
The nightclub Eldorado displayed an enticing line of homosexuals dressed as
women. At the Maly, there was a choice of feminine or collar-and-tie lesbians.
Collective lust roared unashamed at the theatre. In the revue Chocolate Kiddies,
when Josephine Baker appeared naked except for a girdle of bananas, it was pre-
Louise Brooks
369
cisely as Lulu’s stage entrance was described by Wedekind: “They rage there as
in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage.”
Every actor has a natural animosity toward every other actor, present or ab¬
sent, living or dead. Most Hollywood directors did not understand that, any
more than they understood why an actor might be tempted to withhold the rapt
devotion to the master which they considered essential to their position of com¬
mand. When I went to Berlin to film Pandora’s Box, what an exquisite release,
what a revelation of the art of direction, was the Pabst spirit on the set! He ac¬
tually encouraged actors’ disposition to hate and back away from each other,
and thus preserved their energy for the camera; and when actors were not in
use, his ego did not command them to sit up and bark at the sight of him. The
behavior of Fritz Kortner was a perfect example of how Pabst used an actor’s
true feelings to add depth and breadth and power to his performance. Kortner
hated me. After each scene with me, he would pound off the set and go to his
dressing room. Pabst himself, wearing his most private smile, would go there
to coax him back for the next scene. In the role of Dr. Schon, Kortner had feel¬
ings for me (or for the character Lulu) that combined sexual passion with an
equally passionate desire to destroy me. One sequence gave him an opportu¬
nity to shake me with such violence that he left ten black-and-blue fingerprints
on my arms. Both he and Pabst were well pleased with that scene, because Pabst’s
feelings for me, like Kortner’s, were not unlike those of Schon for Lulu. I think
that in the two films Pabst made with me— Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl —
he was conducting an investigation into his relations with women, with the ob¬
ject of conquering any passion that interfered with his passion for his work. He
was not aroused by sexual love, which he dismissed as an enervating myth. It
was sexual hate that engrossed his whole being with its flaming reality.
With adroit perversity, Pabst selected Gustav Diessl to play Jack the Ripper
in Pandora’s Box, and Fritz Rasp to play the lascivious chemist’s assistant in Diary
of a Lost Girl. They were the only actors in those films whom I found beautiful
and sexually alluring. There was no complexity in Pabst’s direction of the Jack
the Ripper scenes. He made them a tender love passage until that terrible mo¬
ment when Diessl saw the knife on the edge of the table, gleaming in the can¬
dlelight. But, conceiving the seduction scenes in Diary of a Lost Girl as a ballet,
with me (Thymiane) as the seductress, he directed them as a series of subtle, al¬
most wordless maneuvers between an “innocent” young girl and a wary lecher.
He chose Fritz Rasp not only for the restraint with which he would play a part
verging on burlesque but also for his physical grace and strength. When I col¬
lapsed in his embrace, he swept me up into his arms and carried me off to bed
as lightly as if I weighed no more than my silken nightgown and robe.
Unlike most directors, Pabst had no catalogue of characters, with stock emo¬
tional responses. D. W. Griffith required giggling fits from all sexually excited
37°
Early Days
virgins. If Pabst had ever shot a scene showing a virgin giggling, it would have
been because someone was tickling her. It was the stimulus that concerned him.
If he got that right, the actor’s emotional reaction would be like life itself—often
strange and unsatisfactory to an audience that was used to settled acting con¬
ventions. When Pandora’s Box was released, in 1929, film critics objected
because Lulu did not suffer after the manner of Sarah Bernhardt in Camille. Pub¬
licity photographs taken before the filming of Pandora’s Box show Pabst watching
me with scientific intensity. Anticipating all my scenes in his films, he contrived
to put me in similar situations in real life. A well-timed second visit to the set by
the actress and future filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl—gabbing and laughing off in
a corner with Pabst—guaranteed my look of gloomy rejection in a closeup in
Diary of a Lost Girl. His tested knowledge of cause and effect is part of the answer
to how Pabst could shoot very fast, with little rehearsal and few takes.
I revered Pabst for his truthful picture of this world of pleasure which let me
play Lulu naturally. The other members of the cast were tempted to rebellion.
And perhaps that was his most brilliant directorial achievement—getting a
group of actors to play unsympathetic characters, whose only motivation was
sexual gratification. Fritz Kortner, as Schon, wanted to be the victim. Franz Led-
erer, as the incestuous son Alva Schon, wanted to be adorable. Carl Goetz
wanted to get laughs playing the old pimp Schigolch. Alice Roberts, the Belgian
actress who played the screen’s first lesbian, the Countess Geschwitz, was pre¬
pared to go no further than repression in mannish suits. Her first day’s work
was in the wedding sequence. She came on the set looking chic in her Paris
evening dress and aristocratically self-possessed. Then Mr. Pabst began ex¬
plaining the action of the scene in which she was to dance the tango with me.
Suddenly, she understood that she was to touch, to embrace, to make love to
another woman. Her blue eyes bulged and her hands trembled. Anticipating the
moment of explosion, Mr. Pabst, who proscribed unscripted emotional out¬
bursts, caught her arm and sped her away out of sight behind the set. A half hour
later, when they returned, he was hissing soothingly to her in French and she
was smiling like the star of the picture—which she was in all her scenes with
me. I was just there obstructing the view. Both in two-shots and in her close-
ups photographed over my shoulder, she cheated her look past me to Mr. Pabst,
who was making love to her off camera. Out of the funny complexity of this de¬
sign Mr. Pabst extracted his tense portrait of sterile lesbian passion, and Mme.
Roberts satisfactorily preserved her reputation. At the time, her conduct struck
me as silly. The fact that the public could believe an actress’s private life to be
like one role in one film did not come home to me till 1964, when I was visited
by a French boy. Explaining why the young people in Paris loved Pandora’s Box,
he put an uneasy thought in my mind.
“You talk as if I were a lesbian in real life,” I said.
Louise Brooks
37i
“But of course!” he answered, in a way that made me laugh to realize I had
been living in cinematic perversion for thirty-five years.
It had pleased me on the day I finished the silent version of The Canary Mur¬
der Case for Paramount to leave Hollywood for Berlin to work for Pabst. When
I got back to New York after finishing Pandora’s Box, Paramount’s New York of¬
fice called to order me to get on the train at once for Hollywood. They were
making The Canary Murder Case into a talkie and needed me for retakes. When I
said I wouldn’t go, they sent a man round with a contract. When I still said I
wouldn’t go, they offered me any amount of money I might ask, to save the great
expense of reshooting and dubbing in another voice. In the end, after they were
finally convinced that nothing would induce me to do the retakes, I signed a re¬
lease (gratis) for all my pictures, and they dubbed in Margaret Livingston’s
voice in The Canary Murder Case. But the whole thing—the money that Paramount
was forced to spend, the affront to the studio—made them so angry that they
sent out a story, widely publicized and believed, that they had let me go because
I was no good in talkies.
In Hollywood, I was a pretty flibbertigibbet whose charm for the executive
department decreased with every increase in her fan mail. In Berlin, I stepped
onto the station platform to meet Pabst and became an actress. I would be
treated by him with a kind of decency and respect unknown to me in Hollywood.
It was just as if Pabst had sat in on my whole life and career and knew exactly
where I needed assurance and protection. And, just as his understanding of me
reached back to his knowledge of a past we did not have to speak about, so it
was with the present. For although we were together constantly—on the set,
at lunch, of ten fordinnerand the theatre—he seldom spoke to me. Yet he would
appear at the dressmaker’s at the moment I was about to go into the classic act
of ripping off an offensive wedding dress; he would banish a call boy who roared
at me through the dressing-room door; he would refuse, after the first day’s
rushes, which secretly upset me, to let me see the rushes ever again. All that I
thought and all his reactions seemed to pass between us in a kind of wordless
communication. To other people surrounding him, he would talk endlessly in
that watchful way of his, smiling, intense; speaking quietly, with his wonder¬
ful, hissing precision. But to me he might speak never a word all morning, and
then at lunch turn suddenly and say, “Loueess, tomorrow morning you must be
ready to do a big fight scene with Kortner,” or “This afternoon, in the first scene,
you are going to cry.” That was how he directed me. With an intelligent actor,
he would sit in exhaustive explanation; with an old ham, he would speak the
language of the theatre. But in my case, by some magic, he would saturate me
with one clear emotion and turn me loose. And it was the same with the plot.
Pabst never strained my mind with anything not pertinent to the immediate ac¬
tion. But if I made that picture with only the dimmest notion of what it was about,
372
Early Days
on my second picture with Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl, I had no idea at all of its
plot or meaning till I saw it twenty-seven years later, at Eastman House.
And it was during the making of Diary of a Lost Girl —on the last day of shoot¬
ing, to be exact—that Pabst moved into my future. We were sitting gloomily
at a table in the garden of a little cafe, watching the workmen while they dug
the grave for a burial scene, when he decided to let me have it. Several weeks
before, in Paris, he had met some friends of mine—rich Americans with whom
I spent every hour away from work. And he was angry: first, because he thought
they prevented me from staying in Germany, learning the language, and be¬
coming a serious actress, as he wanted; and, second, because he looked upon
them as spoiled children who would amuse themselves with me for a time and
then discard me like an old toy. “Your life is exactly like Lulu’s,” he said, “and
you will end the same way.”
At that time, knowing so little of what he meant by “Lulu,” I just sat sullenly
glaring at him, trying not to listen. Fifteen years later, in Hollywood, with all
his predictions closing in on me, I heard his words again—hissing back to me.
And, listening this time, I packed my trunks and went home to Kansas. But the
strangest thing of all in my relationship with Mr. Pabst was the revelation tucked
away in a footnote written by Richard Griffith in his book The Film since Then.
He identified me as “Louise Brooks, whom Pabst brought to Germany from Hol¬
lywood to play in Pandora’s Box, whose whole life and career were altered
thereby.” When I read that, thirty years after I refused to go back to Hollywood
to do those retakes on The Canary Murder Case, I finally understood why.
Kevin Beownlow
At a time when many of the great silent stars and a few of the directors were still alive but
might not be for much longer Kevin Brownlow embarked on his irreplaceable book The
Parade’s Gone By. His feeling was that the motion picture reached its greatest heights
in the silent era and had been in decline since; it was a theory many of his subjects agreed
with, and so they opened up to him and told stories they had in some cases been keeping
private for decades. Here are two excerpts: Mary Piclford (1893—1979), who was one of
silent Hollywood's most powerful producers as well as its greatestfemale star, brings Ernst
Kevin B r o w n 1 o w
373
Lubitsch over from Germany, differs with him, and many years later has reduced the ex¬
perience to hilarious anecdotes. And Gloria Swanson (1891—1983), who adores Cecil B.
De Mille, finds herself sitting on his knee and being called his brave boy.
Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson
Mary Pickford
I will not allow one picture to be shown: Rosita. Oh, I detested that picture! I
disliked the director, Ernst Lubitsch, as much as he disliked me. We didn’t show
it, of course, but it was a very unhappy and very costly experience.
Lubitsch was on his way over from Germany when the American Legion held
a big meeting. I was on the platform. The supreme officer of the Legion got up
and said, “I hear the son of the Kaiser is coming here. I would to God that the
American Legion would go down to meet him—and throw him in the water.
He doesn’t belong here. He’s still our enemy. And why are they bringing Ger¬
man singers over here? Do we not have enough good singers here, in the United
States, without going to Germany?”
“Oh,” I thought, “here it comes. I'll be next. ‘What is she doing bringing Lu¬
bitsch over here? Do we not have good American directors?’ ” I wasn’t going to
take it sitting down. I decided that I would get up and speak. Perspiration began
to break out on my forehead. This is what 1 planned to say:
“General, ladies and gentlemen. Since when has art borderlines? Art is uni¬
versal, and for my pictures I will get the finest, no matter which country they
come from. The war is over. And it is very ill-bred and stupid for the General
to stand up and talk like that. A German voice is God-given if it’s beautiful.
“Yes, I am bringing Mr. Lubitsch over here. Yes! I’m proud that I can. And
General, you be grown up, you be a good boy and don ’ t you say that to me, be¬
cause I’m white, twenty-one, and an American citizen, and I contributed to the
war as you did. But you’re not contributing to anything with opinions like that.”
I remember that speech to this day. I had it all set—and he never called on
me. I was very disappointed.
Lubitsch was on the water, coming over, so I said, “We’re in trouble. The
American Legion may meet him.” We arranged for a little pilot boat to take him
off the ship. He was instructed not to mention Mary Pickford, where he was
going, or what he was doing, and above all he was told not to mention Germany.
When he arrived in Hollywood I naturally sent Mrs. Lubitsch a large bunch
of flowers. The newspaper people immediately wanted to know about it.
374
Early Days
“What are you doing here, Mr. Lubitsch?”
Putting the card in his pocket, Lubitsch replied, “I’m not talking.”
“Are you going to work?”
“Nein.”
I first met him on the studio lot, with Edward Knoblock and Douglas Fair¬
banks. Knoblock spoke perfect German, and he introduced us. Lubitsch took
my hand, and suddenly threw it away from him.
u Ach, mein Gott!" he exclaimed. “She is cold!”
“Oh, he’s just nervous,” I thought.
u Ja, cold!” he repeated. “She cannot be an actress!”
“Our actresses are paid to act,” said Knoblock. “They don’t act when offstage,
or away from the camera. You’re judging her by German actresses.”
Lubitsch was watching me all the time, to see if I would blow up. I kept my
temper.
Our first production together was to be Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, and
he had read the script. I had spent a quarter of a million dollars in preparation.
I remember seeing Knoblock and Lubitsch moving through the wheatfield at the
back of the studio—the wheat was chest high, and they were swimming through
it. “There goes trouble,” I said to my mother.
Knoblock approached us and said, “I’m sorry. Lubitsch won’t do Dorothy Ver-
»
non.
“Edward!” I said. “Why not? He read the script in Germany, he came over
here, he’s been receiving salary, I paid his fare, and that of his wife . . .”
“Will you see him?” asked Knoblock.
“Of course,” I said. “I’ll have to.”
I went over to my bungalow, which I had just had painted a dove gray. Lu¬
bitsch used to eat German-fried potatoes three times a day, and I was dismayed
when the grease on his hands left little frescoes all around the room.
“All right, Mr. Lubitsch,” I said. “What’s wrong?”
He pounded my beautiful table with his fist and he shouted “I’m not making
Dorothy Vernonl”
“Well,” I said, “you read the script...”
“J a. I don’t like it.”
“Why didn’t you say that in Germany?”
“Veil, now I’m telling you.”
“What’s wrong with Dorothy Vernon ?”
“Der iss too many qveens and not enough qveens.”
Elizabeth and Mary; he objected to their story being more interesting than
that of Dorothy Vernon. Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots could have
been a story on their own, but there wasn’t enough in the script to make that
possible.
Kevin B r o w n 1 o w
175
“All right,” I said. “I can’t force you to do something you don’t want to do.”
“I go back to Germany.”
1 told him he could if he wished to. When he’d cooled down I said to Ed¬
ward, “Let’s find another story.” We settled on Rosita. What an ordeal! I had to
fight to get the story right. Lubitsch was a man’s director, he had no sensitivity
about women. He figured himself in every scene—as the man.
We had some amusing things, though. Lubitsch spoke very bad English; he
would say the most censorable things on the set, and everybody would roar with
laughter.
One morning I got onto the set early.
“Now look, boys and girls, if you went to Germany and tried to direct, you
might say things that weren’t proper yourselves. But you wouldn’t like every¬
body to laugh at you. Now the first person that laughs on this stage will have to
leave.”
Lubitsch came in, and promptly said something and everybody disappeared.
Charlie Rosher, my cameraman, hid his face under the black cloth of the stills
camera, other people climbed up the walls of the set, and the only person who
laughed was me. I can’t remember this particular remark, but another occasion
was equally amusing.
It was the big cathedral scene. I guess there were two or three hundred ex¬
tras there. I was in my little dressing room, with my Alsatian maid, who spoke
perfect German.
Lubitsch was outside. He was very pompous and very important, like all lit¬
tle men. “Komm, pliss,” he called, clapping his hands. “Dis is de scenes ver e Miss
Pickford goes mit der beckside to ze altar!”
There was an explosion of laughter. “Bordermayer,” 1 said, “please go out and
tell Mr. Lubitsch that he’s not to say that.” He came in and apologized.
“That’s all right, Mr. Lubitsch. I understand. You’re trying to learn the lan¬
guage.”
“So,” he said. “Correct, pliss, Miss Pickford, is it right to say ‘ Go mit der beck
to ze altar?’ ”
“Perfectly good.”
“So!” he said. He went outside, clapped his hands again, and announced: “Dis
is de scenes vere Miss Pickford goes mit der . . . beck . . . to ze altar.”
Lubitsch was a nice enough man, but he was stubborn. He walked off the set
when Edward Knoblock questioned the accuracy of a scene. He let out a tor¬
rent of German, and then looked around at everyone. He evidently wanted to
say “Oh, good nighd” Instead of which, all he could remember was “Oh, how
do you do!” And he stalked off the set. We waited till the door had shut, and
then you never heard such a roar of laughter.
In the story, Don Diego [George Walsh] is shot by a firing squad with blank
376
Early Days
cartridges. He’s lying on the ground, and I’m supposed to think he’s dead. Lu-
bitsch was a frustrated actor, and he had to act out everything: “You say, ‘Don
Diego, Don Diego, anschver me! Anschver me!’ ”
I tried not to imitate him. “Don Diego!” I cried. “Answer me!” But Lubitsch
corrected me. He called from behind the camera, “Miss Pickford! Again, pliss—
‘anschver me!’ ”
To keep him happy I imitated him, and George Walsh’s stomach started going
up and down in convulsions of suppressed laughter.
“George,” I said, “I’ll kill you!”
“I’m not making a sound,” he giggled.
“Your stomach’s moving all over the place! I can’t act!”
Mr. Lubitsch cried, “Stop! Stop! Miss Pickford—vat iss to laugh?”
“Nothing, Mr. Lubitsch. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t make mit der laugh!”
I tried once more: “Don Diego! Anschver me!”
It was no good. George’s stomach went up and down again, and I fell across
him and we both laughed till we cried.
Poor Mr. Lubitsch.
The climax came toward the end of production.
“Look, Mr. Lubitsch,” I said. “This is a love story. You’ve got to put in a se¬
quence that makes the ending important.”
“Nein,” he said. “I’m not making it!”
I thought it over, and I went to his office.
“Mr. Lubitsch. This is the first time you’ve met me as the financial backer
and producer.”
“Vatt iss dis?”
“I’m telling you that I am the Court of Last Appeal. I’m putting up the
money, I am the star, and I am the one that’s known. I won’t embarrass you; I
will never say anything before the company. If I have anything to say, I’ll say it
as I’m saying it now. I didn’t ask you to come to me, I came to your office. But
you are not going to have the last word.”
“Not for a million dollars!”
“I don’t care if it’s for ten million. You are not going to have that privilege.”
With that he started tearing all the buttons off his clothes. Well, I wasn’t los¬
ing my temper.
“That’s final, Mr. Lubitsch.”
He went to Edward Knoblock’s desk and began tearing up valuable papers—
papers that had been written in longhand. What a man. He shook his fist at me,
and he really lost control.
We were going to do Faust with Lubitsch supervising. ButMother didn’tknow
the story of Faust, so Lubitsch told her. “Ja, "he said. “She has a bebby, and she’s
not married, so she stringles the bebby.”
Kevin B r o w n 1 o w
377
Mother said, “What! What was that?”
“Well, Marguerite is not married, she has a bebby, so she stringles it.”
“Not my daughter!” said my mother, outraged. “No sir!” So I didn’t make
Faust. . . .
I parted company with him as soon as I could. I thought he was a very unin¬
spired director. He was a director of doors. Everybody came in and out of doors
. . . He was a good man’s director—good for Jannings and people like that. But
for me he was terrible. To tell you the truth, I never saw his later pictures, be¬
cause of my miserable experience on Rosita. He was very self-assertive, but then
all little men are. . . .
Gloria Swanson
“He was a man I respected tremendously,” said Gloria Swanson. “He demanded
discipline, and got it. He never said a cruel thing to me in the three years I worked
for him. He had great gentleness and appreciated anybody who tried to do a good
job.
“In the Babylonian sequence on Male and Female one of the lions got loose and
came within ten feet of me. The next day, when I came on the set, I was rather
shaken from this experience. I’m a Swede, you see, so there’s a delayed reac¬
tion. Mr. De Mille decided to cut out the shot where the lion is on my back.
“ ‘Mr. De Mille,’ I said, ‘you can’t do that. I want to do it. Please—you
promised me I could.’
“ ‘Young fellow,’ he said, ‘why do you want to do this?’
“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘when I was a little girl, I used to sit at my grandmother’s
piano. On the left-hand side there was a copy of a famous painting called A Lion’s
Bride. You told me you wanted to reproduce this painting, and I’d like to take
part. ’
“ ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I thought maybe it was a little too much for you.’
“In the arena, there was Mr. De Mille, the cameraman and his assistant—and
my father, in army officer’s uniform, standing on top of this arena, looking at
his one and only with his eyes bulging out of his head. There were also two train¬
ers, armed with whips. They folded up canvas and put this on my back, which
was bare to the waist. They put the animal so that his front legs were resting on
me, and little by little they eased the canvas out from under his paws. Then they
cracked their whips till he roared. It felt like thousands of vibrators. Every hair
on my body was standing straight up. I had to close my eyes. The last thing I saw
was Mr. De Mille with a gun.
“There is a postscript to that incident. We had been on Catalina Island, doing
a lot of sea scenes, which were dangerous for me because I don’t swim. Then
came the incident with the lion—and they wanted me to change into another
378
Early Days
gown for another sequence. I just couldn’t do it. I went to see Mr. De Mille in
his office and I started to cry.
“He put me on his knee and treated me like a young child. Well, what was
I? Eighteen, nineteen years old.
“ ‘At last,’ he said, ‘you’re a woman. Now I know it.’ He’d always thought
of me as a young boy, which was why, I suppose, he called me ‘young fellow.’
“ ‘I was going to give you this after the picture,’ he said, ‘because of all the
things that have happened to you—and because you never complained even when
your blood was running to your knees.’
“And he brought out a tray of jewels from a jewelry store. ‘I want you to
choose one as a memento of this picture.’
“My eyes were popping out of my head. I saw a tiny gold-mesh change purse,
not more than four inches square. In the center was a beautiful sapphire. He said,
‘Is this what you really want? Be sure. Look again.’ I did.
“ ‘Yes, Mr. De Mille, I would like this.’
“ ‘That,’ he said, ‘is your gift for being a brave boy.’ ”
John Gillett and
James Blue
Buster Keaton (l 895—1966) is one of the small number ofgreat creators in the cinema,
and of course there is a wealth of material that could be included here about him or by
him. 1 had looked at a lot of it before 1 found this interview, the record of some time that
John Gillett and James Blue spent with him at the Venice Film Festival, when his active
career was long over but his reputation was just coming back into bloom. It must have
been clear to Keaton then that his silent films would never be forgotten, although it was
equally clear that his current services were no longer in demand. His interview is very much
in the spirit of the silent clowns, who were as proud, maybe prouder, of how they had cre¬
ated great scenes than in why.
John Gillett and James Blue
379
“Keaton at Venice”
Saturday, 4 September 1965 was Buster Keaton day at the Venice Festival. At
the Press Conference after the preview of Film (in which Keaton interprets a
Beckett script), the appearance of the familiar stocky figure determinedly stump¬
ing on to the platform was the signal for a standing ovation of wild affection from
the press. “Caro Buster ...” said somebody happily, after a long pause while
Keaton blandly seated himself among a line of fussing officials, and went on to
ask what he thought of the Beckett film. “I don’t know what it was all about,”
the hoarsely grating voice promptly replied, “perhaps you can tell me.” A hand
waved expressively in the air: “The camera was behind me all the time. I ain’t
used to that.”
What was he doing in Italy? He was making a comedy called Two Marines and
a General —“I’m the General.” Loud cheers made it clear that the audience
agreed, and an attempt by the young lady valiantly struggling with three lan¬
guages to translate this as “Ill Maresciallo” was drowned by roars of protest.
Keaton was obviously warming to his task. He stood up and started talking
without waiting for questions, and spoke of the new Dick Lester film he was
shortly joining in Spain. “I’ve had several other offers, but couldn’t take ’em.
N o time to spare”—and there was a certain satisfaction in the way h e said these
last words, as if his present activity made up a little for the waste and neglect of
the last twenty years. One notes that, unlike certain comedians, Keaton does
not need to keep up a stream of wisecracks. Buster himself had taken over the
Palazzo, in full command of his audience once again.
At the evening gala show, more unexpectedly, the smart Venetian audience
also rose to their feet with delighted applause as the celebrities took their places.
Somebody in the next seat poked Keaton. He looked surprised. “For me?” one
could almost hear that dead-pan eyebrow exclaim; and he got up and bowed,
beautifully.
Next day, we were able to interview Keaton at the Excelsior Hotel. Several
other papers and television networks also had the same idea, and we had to wait
a little while. Eventually we saw him peering through a door offthe main foyer,
apparently wiping down the glass panel with his handkerchief for the benefit of
a lady admirer. It was only when he put his head through the space and started
cleaning the “glass” from the other side that we realised that it was a beautiful
Buster gag.
Keaton started talking almost before we got our equipment ready, and in¬
sisted on giving us the most comfortable chairs. He sat bolt upright on the other
side of the table, large eyes staring straight ahead, with the Great Stone Face set
380
Early Days
throughout in expressive immobility except for one charming moment duly
noted in the interview. Our questions triggered off an immediate response, pre¬
cise down to the last little detail, almost as if his films were parading before him
as he talked. And in his mind, Keaton the director seemed quite inseparable from
Buster the actor.
buster keaton : I ought to do something about the new release print of The Gen¬
eral that was shown in London. When the film was to be revived in Eu¬
rope we brought over as many old prints as we could find, in order to pick
out the best reels—to find the ones that hadn’t faded, or been chewed up
by the machine. We gave them to the outfit in Munich who were handling
the film, and they made a duped negative. They did a beautiful job of it.
The first thing they wanted to do, as an experiment, was to translate all
the English titles into German so that they could release the film in Ger¬
many. It did a beautiful business there, so immediately they made some
more prints with French titles for release in France. Now they must have
lost the original list of English titles, so they put them back again into Eng¬
lish from their own German translation.
1 happened to see a print of this new English version in Rome last
week—the same version you had in London—and the titles are mislead¬
ing. For instance, when I’m trying to enlist and I’m asked “What is your
occupation?” I say “bartender.” Well, that type of man gets drafted into
the army immediately. In the new version the title reads “barkeep”—that
means you own the place. And it doesn’t sound as funny anyway in Eng¬
lish: it might in German, I don’t know. Then they put “sir” on to the ends
of sentences because I’m talking to an officer, but there’s no “sirring’ at
all in our titles. Some of the explanatory titles were changed or dropped
as well. Do you remember, for instance, the scene where we all got off
the train and while we were away the engine was stolen? We actually
stopped off there for lunch: the conductor comes into the car and says “This
is Marietta: one hour for lunch.” But they left that title off, and without it
you’d think the train had emptied out because it was the end of the run.
In which case there’s no reason to steal the engine then: they could have
waited until everyone had gone and the place was deserted.
J.G.: Apart from the comedy values, the most impressive thing about all thefeatures you
made during the Twenties is their distinctive visual style. They all have a kind of
look which one associates with a Keaton film. How did you work with your vari¬
ous co-directors to achieve this? Who actually did what?
Number one, I was practically my own producer on all those silent pic¬
tures. I used a co-director on some of them, but the majority I did alone.
And I cut them all myself: I cut all my own pictures.
John G i 11 ett and James Blue
381
J.G.: What exactly would the co-director do?
Co-direct with me, that’s all. He would be out there looking through
the camera, and I’d ask him what he thought. He would maybe say “That
scene looks a little slow”; and then I’d do it again and speed it up. As a
rule, when I’m working alone, the cameraman, the prop man, the elec¬
trician, these are my eyes out there. I’d ask, “Did that work the way I
wanted it to?” and they’d say yes or no. They knew what they were talk¬
ing about.
J.G.: you would choose the actual camera set-ups yourselj?
Always, when it was important for the scene I was going to do. Ifl had
an incidental scene—someone runs in, say, and says “here, you’ve got to
go and do this”—the background wasn’t important. Then I generally just
told the cameraman that I had these two characters in the scene, two full-
length figures, and asked him to pick a good-looking background. He
would go by the sun. He’d say, “I like that back crosslight coming in
through the trees. There are clouds over there right now, so if we hurry
up we can still get them before they disappear.” So I would say “Swell,”
and go and direct the scene in front of the cameraman’s set-up. We took
pains to get good-looking scenery whenever we possibly could, no mat¬
ter what we were shooting.
J.G.: What about the visual idea of thejilms? Take, for instance, a picture like Our Hos¬
pitality, which has a beautiful periodfeeling.
We were very conscious of our stories. We learned in a hurry that we
couldn’t make a feature-length picture the way we had done the two-
reelers; we couldn’t use impossible gags, like the kind of things that hap¬
pen to cartoon characters. We had to eliminate all these things because
we had to tell a logical story that an audience would accept. So story con¬
struction became a very strong point with us.
On Our Hospitality we had this one idea of an old-fashioned Southern
feud. But it looks as though this must have died down in the years it took
me to grow up from being a baby, so our best period for that was to go
back something like eighty years. “All right,” we say. “We go back that
far. And now when I go Souths am I travelling in a covered wagon, or what?
Let’s look up the records and see when the first railroad train was in¬
vented.” Well, we find out: we’ve got the Stephenson Rocket for Eng¬
land and the De Witt Clinton for the United States. And we chose the
Rocket engine because it’s funnier looking. The passenger coaches were
stage coaches with flanged wheels put on them. So we built that entire train
and that set our period for us: 1825 was the actual year of the invention
of the railroad. Now we dress our people to that period. And that was fine
because we liked the costumes: you’ve got away there from the George
382
Early Days
Washington short pants and into the more picturesque Johnny Walker type
of costume.
J.G.: One of the best gags in the film is the moment when you swing out by a rope from
the river-bank and catch the girl almost in mid-air as she goes over the big water¬
fall. How did you stage this very tricky shot?
We had to build that dam: we built it in order to fit that trick. The set
was built over a swimming pool, and we actually put up four eight-inch
water pipes, with big pumps and motors to run them, to carry the water
up from the pool to create our waterfall. That fall was about six inches
deep. A couple of times I swung out underneath there and dropped up¬
side down when I caught her. I had to go down to the doctor right there
and then. They pumped out my ears and nostrils and drained me, because
when a full volume of water like that comes down and hits you and you're
upside down—then you really get it.
J.G.: How long did it take to shoot the scene? How many takes were there?
I think I got it on the third take. I missed the first two, but the third
one I got it. . . And it’s hard to realise that it was shot in 1923. It sounds
like going back into ancient history.
J.B.: But it still works. Two weeks ago in Paris 1 saw The Three Ages, which is also
forty-two years old, and the audience were rolling in the aisles. Presumably you did
this as a take-iff on films like Intolerance?
I was thinking of Intolerance when I made it. I told the three separate
stories the same as Griffith did; and of course in that film I did take liber¬
ties, because it was more of a travesty than a burlesque. That’s why I used
a wristwatch that was a sun-dial, and why I used my helmet the way I did.
Fords at that time had a safety device to stop people from stealing the cars:
a thing with a big spike which you locked on the back wheel and which
looked just like my Roman helmet. So I unlocked my Roman helmet off
me and locked it on to the wheel of my chariot. At that time the audience
all compared it with the safety gadget for a Ford.
J.B. : This seems to lead to the question of how you find your gags. Do you get them from
the set, things in the decor . . . ?
Yes, props, and characters, and everything, and then look for the sim¬
plest things to go wrong. And that leads to bigger things. But there is noth¬
ing worse with us than a misplaced gag. Someone may suggest a good gag,
or even an excellent one, but if it doesn’t fit the story I’m doing and I try
to drag it in, then it looks dragged in on the screen. So it’s much better
to save it, until some time when it does fit what I’m doing.
J.B.: Quite often you start off a film rather slowly, and the camera movement increases
as the action builds up.
Deliberately. I always do that. I use the simplest little things in the
John Gillett and James Blue
383
world, and I never look for big gags to start a picture. I don’t want them
in the first reel, because if I ever get a big laughing sequence in the first
reel, then I’m going to have trouble following it later. The idea that I had
to have a gag or get a laugh in every scene ... I lost that a long time ago.
It makes you strive to be funny and you go out of your way trying. It’s not
a natural thing.
J.G.: In the shortfilms it was different, of course, because you had to make it funny all
the way. Playhouse— the one about the theatre in which you play almost every
part—is absolutely packed with jokes. Was it in some ways easier to think up these
separate gagsfor the shortfilms, or did you prefer to have time to work out a story?
We didn’t rush. When we thought we had what we wanted, we went
ahead and ordered the sets built. But I made one very bad mistake with
that picture The Playhouse. I could have made the whole two-reeler just by
myself, without any trouble. But we were a little scared to do it, because
it might have looked as though we were trying to show how versatile I
was—that I could make a whole half-hour picture all alone, without an¬
other soul in the cast. That’s the reason why we brought other people into
the second reel, and that was a mistake.
J.B. : By the time you came to thefeatures, the action was no longer just the basisfor the
gags but thoroughly integrated with them. Do you consistently look for a gag that
will help to advance the action?
Take one from a picture that I am about to re-release, The Seven Chances.
I am running away from a batch of women who are chasing me. A friend
has put it in the paper that I’ll marry anybody so long as I can be married
by five o’clock—it has to do with inheriting an estate or whatever. So all
the women in the world show up to get married. They chase me out of
the church, and so on. I went down to the dunes just off the Pacific Ocean
out at Los Angeles, and I accidentally dislodged a boulder in coming down.
All I had set up for the scene was a camera panning with me as I came over
the skyline and was chased down into the valley. But I dislodged this rock,
and it in turn dislodged two others, and they chased me down the hill.
That’s all there was: just three rocks. But the audience at the preview
sat up in their seats and expected more. So we went right back and or¬
dered 1 ,foo rocks built, from bowling alley size up to boulders eight feet
in diameter. Then we went out to the Ridge Route, which is in the High
Sierras, to a burnt mountain steeper than a forty-five degree angle. A cou¬
ple of truckloads of men took those rocks up and planted them; and then
I went up to the top, and came down with the rocks. That gag gave me
the whole final chase, and it was an accident in the first place.
J.G.: The great thing about that chase is that a lot of it is shotfrom a long way away,
so that you get the effect of the tinyfigure with the rocks all round. You often seem
384
Early Days
to pref er to work within a rather large shot, rather than using a lot of close-ups.
When I’ve got a gag that spreads out, I hate to jump a camera into close-
ups. So I do everything in the world I can to hold it in that long-shot and
keep the action rolling. When I do use cuts I still won’t go right into a close-
up: I ’ 11 just go in maybe to a full figure, but that’s about as close as I ’ 11 come.
Close-ups are too jarring on the screen, and this type of cut can stop an
audience from laughing.
If I were going to show you this hotel lobby where we are now, for in¬
stance, I’d go back and show you the whole lobby on that first shot, and
then move in closer. But the main thing is that I want you to be familiar
with the atmosphere, so that you know what my location is and where I
am. From then on I never have to go back to the long shot again unless I
get into action where I am going to cover space in a hurry.
J .G.: Could you tell us something about Steamboat Bill Jr., with the big cyclone at the
end when you get the impression that the whole set is being systematically destroyed?
It must have been one of the most elaborate of all yourfilms to stage.
The original story I had was about the Mississippi, but we actually used
the Sacramento River in California, some six hundred miles north of Los
Angeles. We went up there and built that street front, three blocks of it,
and built the piers and so on. We found the river boats right there in Sacra¬
mento: one was brand new, and we were able to age the other one up to
make it look as though it was ready to fall apart. My original situation in
that film was a flood. But my so-called producer on that film was Joe
Schenck, who at that time was producing Norma Talmadge, Constance
Talmadge and myself, and who later became president of United Artists.
Then later on 2 oth Century-Fox was Joe Schenck, and his brother Nicholas
Schenck was head man of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Schenck was supposed
to be my producer but he never knew when or what I was shooting. He
just turned me loose.
Well, the publicity man on Steamboat Bill goes to Schenck and he says:
“He can’t do a flood sequence because we have floods every year and too
many people are lost. It’s too painful to get laughs with.” So Schenck told
me, “You can’t do a flood.” I said, “That’s funny, since it seems to me that
Chaplin during World War One made a picture called Shoulder Arms,
which was the biggest money-maker he’d made at that time. You can’t get
a bigger disaster than that, and yet he made his biggest laughing picture
out of it.” He said, “Oh, that’s different.” I don’t know why it was differ¬
ent. I asked if it was all right to make it a cyclone, and he agreed that was
better. Now he didn’t know it, but there are four times more people killed
in the United States by hurricanes and cyclones than by floods. But it was
all right as long as he didn’t find that out, and so I went ahead with my
technical man and did the cyclone.
John G i 11 ett and James Blue
J.G.: How about the technical side? The marvellous shot, for instance, of the front of the
buildingfalling on you, so that you are standing in the windows as it hits the ground.
What were the problems in staging that scene?
First I had them build the framework of this building and make sure that
the things were all firm and solid. It was a building with a tall V-shaped
roof, so that we could make this window up in the roof exceptionally high.
An average second storey window would be about i 2 feet, but we’re up
about 18 feet. Then you lay this framework down on the ground, and build
the window round me. We built the window so that I had a clearance of
two inches on each shoulder, and the top missed my head by two inches
and the bottom my heels by two inches. We mark that ground out and
drive big nails where my two heels are going to be. Then you put that house
back up in position while they finish building it. They put the front on,
painted it, and made the jagged edge where it tore away from the main
building; and then we went in and fixed the interiors so that you’re look¬
ing at a house that the front has blown off. Then we put up our wind ma¬
chines with the big Liberty motors. We had six of them and they are
pretty powerful: they could lift a truck right off the road. Now we had to
make sure that we were getting our foreground and background wind ef¬
fect, but that no current ever hit the front of that building when it started
to fall, because if the wind warps her she’s not going to fall where we want
her, and I’m standing right out in front. But it’s a one-take scene and we
got it that way. You don’t do those things twice.
J.B. : Your usual method was to start with a story and then look for the gags. Where did
you begin with a film like The General?
I took that first page out of the history book. Disney did it about nine
years ago and called it by its original name— The Great Locomotive Chase,
with Fess Parker. But he made a mistake and told it from a Northerner’s
standpoint. And you can always make villains out of the Northerners, but
you cannot make a villain out of the South. That was the first mistake he
made.
In The General I took that page of history and I stuck to it in all detail. I
staged it exactly the way it happened. The Union agents intended to enter
from the State of Kentucky, which was neutral territory, pretending that
they were coming down to fight for the Southern cause. That was an ex¬
cuse to get on that train which takes them up to an army camp. Their leader
took seven men with him, including two locomotive engineers and a tele¬
graph operator; and he told them that if anything went wrong they were
to scatter individually, stick to their stories that they were Kentuckians
down to enlist in the Southern army, and then watch for the first oppor¬
tunity to desert and get back over the line to the North. As soon as they
stole that engine, they wanted to pull out of there, to disconnect the tele-
386
Early Days
graph and bum bridges and destroy enough track to cripple the Southern
army supply route. That was what they intended to do. And I staged the
chase exactly the way it happened. Then I rounded out the story of steal¬
ing my engine back. When my picture ended the South was winning, which
was all right with me.
J.B.: How did the plot develop apartfrom the historical story line—the involvement with
the girl and so on?
Well, the moment you give me a locomotive and things like that to play
with, as a rule I find some way of getting laughs with it. But the original
locomotive chase ended when I found myself in Northern territory and
had to desert. From then on it was my invention, in order to get a com¬
plete plot. It had nothing to do with the Civil War.
J.G.: What many of us like about yourfilms is the treatment of the women. These poor
ladies, like Marian Mack in The General, are subjected to all kinds of humilia¬
tions and yet they battle on. They get pulled and pushed around, but they always
stand by you. Did they mind at all?
No, no. They didn’t mind at all. Oh God, that girl in The General had
more fun with that picture than any film she’d made in her life. (At this
point Keaton sface, hithertofrozen as usual, eased into a wide, knowing smile.) I
guess it’s because so many leading ladies in those days looked as though
they had just walked out of a beauty parlour. They always kept them look¬
ing that way—even in covered wagons, they kept their leading ladies
looking beautiful at all times. We said to thunder with that, we’ll dirty
ours up a bit and let them have some rough treatment.
j .B. : There is a moment of almost pathetic beauty, which is a gag at the same time, when
you are both sitting on the steering rod of the wheel and the train starts to move.
Not at the very end, but towards the middle of the film.
I was alone on it when it moved. We were afraid to put her on it, or I
would have moved it at the finish.
J.B.: Can you remember how that gag came to you, out of thefilm’s situation?
Well, the situation of the picture at that point is that she says “never
speak to me again until you’re in uniform.” So the bottom has dropped
out of everything, and I’ve got nothing to do but sit down on my engine
and think. I don’t know why they rejected me: they didn’t tell me it was
because they didn’t want to take a locomotive engineer off his duty. My
fireman wants to put the engine away in the round-house and doesn’t know
that I’m sitting on the cross bar, and starts to take it in.
I was running that engine myself all through the picture: I could han¬
dle that thing so well I was stopping it on a dime. But when it came to this
shot I asked the engineer whether we could do it. He said: “There’s only
one danger. A fraction too much steam with these old-fashioned engines
and the wheel spins. And if it spins it will kill you right then and there.”
John G i 11 ett and James Blue
387
W e tried it out four or five times, and in the end the engineer was satis¬
fied that he could handle it. So we went ahead and did it. I wanted a fade-
out laugh for that sequence: although it’s not a big gag it’s cute and funny
enough to get me a nice laugh.
J.G.: It’s also beautiful: it has another quality than just a laugh. On this question of
emotion, there is the difference between yourfilms and those of Chaplin, who some¬
times seems to go into a sequence with the intention of milking it for all the emo¬
tion it can stand. You are rarely deliberately pathetic. In Go West, however, there
is a slight element of conscious pathos. Did you feel you needed something more
emotional there than in the other films?
I was going to do everything I possibly could to keep that cow from
being sent to the slaughter-house: I only had that one thing in mind. And
I ran into one disappointment on that film. One of the most famous West¬
ern shows ever seen in the United States was called “The Heart of Mary¬
land,” in which these two guys are playing cards, and one guy calls the other
a name, and he takes out his six-shooter and lays it down on the table,
pointing right at this fellow’s middle, and says, “When you call me that,
smile ...” Well, because I’m known as frozen face, blank pan, we
thought that if you did that to me an audience would say, “Oh my God,
he can’t smile: he’s gone; he’s dead.” But it didn’t strike an audience as
funny at all: they just felt sorry for me. We didn’t find that out until the
preview, and it put a hole in my scene right there and then. Of course I
got out of it the best way I could, but we run into these lulls every now
and then.
J.B.: And you look for a gag to get yourself out of a situation: the pole-vault gag with
the spear for instance in The Three Ages. There you were in a situation where
you had to get the girl out of the hands of Wallace Beery. How did you work your
way to the spear vault from that?
I couldn’t just run over a batch of rocks or something to get to her: I
had to invent something, find something unexpected, and pole-vaulting
with a spear seemed to be it.
J.G.: You very often use gags which couldn’t be managed except in films. For instance
the scene in Sherlock Jr. where you are dreaming yourself into the picture, and
the scenery keeps changing. How did you get the idea of this scene?
That was the reason for making the whole picture. Just that one situa¬
tion: that a motion picture projectionist in a theatre goes to sleep and vi¬
sualises himself getting mixed up with the characters on the screen. All
right, then my job was to transform those characters on the screen into
my (the projectionist’s) characters at home, and then I’ve got my plot.
Now to make it work was another thing; and after that picture was made
every cameraman in Hollywood spent more than one night watching it and
trying to figure out just how we got some of those scenes.
388
Early Days
J.G.: How did you actually do the sequence where you are near a tree, and then you are
on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Was it some kind of back projection?
No, thathadn’t been invented then. We call it processing, but back pro¬
jection is correct. But it hadn’t been invented. We used measuring in¬
struments for that sequence. When I stood on that rock I was going to jump
into the ocean, but as I jumped the sea changed to something else. As I
looked down 1 held still for a moment, and we ended that scene. Then we
brought out tape-measures, put a cross-bar in front of the earner a to square
it off, and measured me from two angles. That made sure that I was in ex¬
actly the same spot as far as the camera was concerned. We also used sur¬
veyor’s instruments to get me the same height, so that when we changed
the scene and I went back on the set I was in exactly the same place as in
the first shot. Then the cameraman just starts to crank and I jump; and
when 1 jump I hit something else. I don’t remember what I hit, but I hit
something. This was all done just by changing the sets. But I on the screen
never changed.
S. J. Pekelman
Having been devastated by Griffith’s Way Down East as a youth, S. J. Perelman
(1904—19J9) revisited it in the 1950s, finding he had become more jaded in the
meantime and now appreciated the innocence of Lillian Gish less than the malevolence of
Lowell Sherman. There may never have been a better one-sentence description of a movie
villain than “They had to spray him with fungicide between takes to keep the mushrooms
from forming on him."
“I’m Sorry I Made Me Cry”
The consulting room I sat in that dun December afternoon in 1920 was a per¬
fect setting for a senior Rhode Island eye specialist, and Dr. Adrian Budlong was
perf ectly cast in the role of the specialist. A septuagenarian with a sunken, ema-
S. J. P e r e1m a n
389
dated face, and as angular as a praying mantis, Dr. Budlong bore a chilling re¬
semblance to the mummified Rameses II, and it would not have surprised me
to learn that he kept his entrails in an alabaster canopic jar under his desk. The
room itself was rather like a crypt, dark and redolent of musty bindings and io¬
doform; behind the Doctor’s head, in the shadows, a bust of Galen just large
enough for a raven to perch on scowled down at me balefully. For forty-five min¬
utes, Dr. Budlong, in an effort to discover why my eyelids were swollen like
Smyrna figs, had submitted me to every test known to ophthalmology. He had
checked my vision with all manner of graduated charts and images, made me
swivel my eyeballs until they bellied from their sockets, peered endlessly into
my irises with sinister flashlights. The examination, clearly, had been fruitless,
for he was now bombarding me with questions that struck me as irrelevant, if
not fatuous. Had I eaten any toadstools recently, been stung by any wasps or
hornets? Had I wittingly stepped on a rattlesnake or serpent of any description?
“I—I swim under water a lot at the Y.M.C.A.,” I faltered. “Maybe the dis¬
infectant—”
“Chlorine never hurt anybody,” he snapped. “Clears the brain.” With a palsied
clawlike hand, he plucked the optical mirror from his death’s-head and dropped
it on the blotter. “Humph—no reason a boy of your age should Suddenly start
looking like a bullfrog. Have you been under any mental strain lately? What kind
of stuff d’ye read?”
“Er—mostly history,” I said evasively. “Balzac’s Droll Stories, the Decameron,
Brantome’s Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies —”
“Nothing there that would affect the lids especially,” he said, with what I con¬
sidered unnecessary coarseness. “Now let’s stop paltering around, young man.
What have you been crying about?” Somewhere deep in my consciousness, a lou¬
ver flew open and I saw the fa£ade of the Providence Opera House, the temple
where every moviegoer in town had been snuffling uncontrollably over D. W.
Griffith’s great tear-jerker Way Down East. Choking back a sob, I confessed
shamefacedly that I had seen the picture three times. Dr. Budlong regarded me
for a full twenty minutes in silence, patently undecided whether to have me cer¬
tified or bastinadoed. Then, making no effort to conceal his spleen, he prescribed
cold poultices and a moratorium on cinematic pathos, and flung me out. By an
evil circumstance, the trolley car that bore me homeward passed the Opera
House. Hours later, streaked with tears, and blubbering from my fourth expo¬
sure to the masterpiece, I informed my folks that Budlong had pronounced me
a victim of winter hay fever. The diagnosis aroused no visible furor. By then the
family was impervious to shock.
Not long ago, examining the network of laughter lines around my eyes in the
mirror, it occurred to me that I was in peril of becoming a slippered popinjay.
39 °
Early Days
Life since forty had been so rollicking and mirthful that I had allowed my sen¬
timental, nobler instincts to retrogress; what I needed, and pronto, was a pro¬
found emotional nettoyage. Accordingly, I downed twenty pages of Thomas
Merton, the spiritual equivalent of sulphur and molasses, listened to Jan Peerce’s
superbly emetic recording of “What Is a Boy?” and topped it off with a matinee
of Way Down East at the Museum of Modem Art. I can get around the house pass¬
ably by holding on to the furniture, but I still feel a mite queasy.
The leitmotiv of Way Down East, like that of so many early film melodramas,
was innocence betrayed, virtue—doggedly sullied through ten reels—rising tri¬
umphant and kneeing its traducer in the groin. The sweet resignation with
which Lillian Gish, the heroine, underwent every vicissitude of fortune from bas¬
tardy to frostbite, and the lacquered, mandarin composure of Richard
Barthelmess in the face of ostracism and blizzard, have rarely been surpassed on
celluloid. It was, however, Lowell Sherman, that peerless actor, who, in his
delineation of the villain, copped the honors. Exquisitely groomed, a trifle
flaccid, the epitome of the jaded roue, he moved catlike through the action,
stalking his prey, his face a mask of smiling insincerity that occasionally let slip
a barbered sneer. When he tapped a cigarette deliberately on his silver case and
cast a cool, speculative glance into a woman’s bodice, you knew she would never
survive the rabbit test. Sidney Blackmer, Henry Daniell, Robert Morley—there
have been many able varmints since, but none quite as silky or loathsome as Low¬
ell Sherman. They had to spray him with fungicide between takes to keep the
mushrooms from forming on him.
Way Down East, billed in its opening title as “a simple story for plain people”
(the adjectives would seem to be interchangeable), starts off with a windy
hundred-and-twenty-two-word essay containing far less juice than pulp and
seeds. Its general content is that while polygamy is on the wane, monogamy is
not yet worldwide—an assertion calculated to lacerate nobody’s feelings,
whether Bedouin or Baptist. The locale of the drama, continues the preamble,
is “in the story world of make-believe; characters nowhere, yet everywhere.”
Having slaked the passion for universality that constantly assailed him, Griffith
yielded the stage to his puppets. Anna Moore (Miss Gish) and her widowed
mother, destitute in a New England village, decide to put the sleeve on the
Tremonts, their rich Boston relatives. Clad in gingham and a black wide-awake
straw, Anna sets off for their mansion, bumbling into a stylish musicale they are
giving and discomfiting her snobbish female cousins. In order to make charac¬
ter with a rich, eccentric aunt, however, the Tremonts swallow their resent¬
ment and take Anna in. Simultaneously, the girl has a fleeting encounter with
her seducer-to-be, dashing Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman), who smirks
into her cleavage and earmarks her for future spoliation. We now whisk to the
countervailing influence in Anna’s life, David Bartlett (Richard Barthelmess),
S. J. Ferelman
39i
as he scratches a pigeon’s neck on his father’s farm, adjacent to Sanderson’s coun¬
try estate. “Though of plain stock,” the subtitle explains, “he has been tutored
by poets and vision wide as the world.” He has also had access, it might be noted,
to a remarkable pomade, which keeps his hair snugly plastered to his scalp no
matter how turbulent the action becomes. The secret of Barthelmess’s hair has
never ceased to fascinate me. In every picture I recall him in, from Broken Blos¬
soms and Tol’able David to The Idol Dancer and The Love Flower, nothing ever dis¬
turbed that sleek coiffure. Cockney bruisers beat the daylights out of
Barthelmess, bullying mates kicked him down hatchways and flailed him with
marlinspikes, and Papuans boiled him in kettles, but he always looked as though
he had just emerged from the Dawn Patrol Barbershop. Of course, there is no
external evidence that his hair was real; it may merely have been Duco, sprayed
on him between takes, like Sherman’s fungicide, but how they ever prevented
it from cracking is beyond me.
Anna’s downfall, the next item on the agenda, is one of the most precipitous
and brutal since the sack of Constantinople by the Turks. Sanderson spies her
at a society rout, almost unbearably ethereal in soft focus and a cloud of tulle,
and, closing in, murmurs thickly, “In your beauty lives again Elaine, the Lily
Maid, love-dreaming at Astolat.” Enchanted by this verbal zircon, Anna dim¬
ples from head to toe and implores, “Tell me more.” He obliges, with such no¬
table effect that she ultimately agrees to a secret marriage ceremony, unaware
that the parson is bogus and the witnesses fixed. From then on, the poor crea¬
ture is fed through the dramatic wringer with relentless ferocity. After her re¬
turn home, she finds she is gravid, appeals to Sanderson—who, meanwhile, has
gone on to other amorous diversions—and discovers that she has been euchred.
Sanderson callously deserts her, on the pretext that he will be disinherited if their
liaison comes to light, and Anna’s mother, with typical maternal spitefulness,
dies off just when she is most needed. The baby languishes from birth; when it
succumbs, giving Anna endless golden opportunities for histrionics, she is ex¬
pelled from her lodgings by a righteous landlady, and the first portion of her
Gethsemane concludes. The least sophisticated movie fan senses, though, that
his tear ducts are being permitted only the briefest respite. Better than any di¬
rector before or since, Griffith understood the use of the bean ball, and he now
prepares to pitch it square at his leading lady and reduce everyone to jelly.
Drawn by the peculiar magnetism that polarizes movie characters, Anna
wanders to the Bartlett farm, meets David, and so generally excites pity that
Squire Bartlett, his gruff, bigoted father, gives her a minor post agitating a
churn. The farm hums with all sorts of romantic activity. There is, for instance,
a visiting niece named Kate who is alternately being courted by Hi Holler, the
hired man, and the Professor, an absent-minded pedagogue with a butterfly net.
Gusty bucolic comedy ensues when the former, daubing his shoes and hair with
axle grease to enhance his charm, is struck on the head by a new-laid egg and
392 Early Days
backs into a pitchfork. Also on hand to provoke chuckles is a rustic twosome
made up of Martha Perkins, the village gossip, and her perennial admirer, a hay¬
seed in a linen duster who quaffs Long Life Bitters. The story meanders
sluggishly along for a spell, washing up tender symbols like cooing buds and
bursting doves to blueprint David’s bias for Anna, and then Lennox Sanderson
pops in again, this time mousing around after Kate. He berates Anna for re¬
maining in his bailiwick and, in truly heartless fashion, orders her to clear off.
As she is about to, though, David shyly confesses his beguin for her (and nobody
could confess a beguin more shyly than Barthelmess, without moving so much
as a muscle in his face). At length, sorely troubled, she decides to stay—a dif¬
ficult decision and similar to one that I myself, by a coincidence, was having to
make. Confidentially, it was touch and go.
Except for love’s gradual ripening, the next thousand feet of the film are as
devoid of incident as a Fitzpatrick travel talk on Costa Rica, Land of the Coffee
Bean. There is a plethora of fields choked with daisies, misty-eyed colloquies,
and orotund subtitles like “One heart for one heart, one soul for one soul, one
love, even through eternity. At last the great overwhelming love, only to be
halted by the stark ghost of her past.” With the onset of winter, the plot regis¬
ters a sudden galvanic twitch. Just as Anna is stalemated between David’s
proposal, which she cannot bring herself to accept, and Sanderson’s renewed
persecutions, her onetime landlady happens into the village, recognizes her, and
recounts her shame to the sewing circle. Martha Perkins, of course, instantly
hurries to the Squire to apprise him that he is harboring a Jezebel, and the fat is
in the fire. Anna is excoriated in front of the entire household and driven forth
despite David’s protestations, but not before she castigates Sanderson as her be¬
trayer. A blizzard, which has been picking its teeth in the wings, now comes in
on cue, and enfolding the outcast, whirls her toward the icebound river. David,
who meanwhile has been locked in mortal combat with Sanderson (without hav¬
ing his hair mussed, naturally), flattens his adversary and runs to intercept Anna;
the ice goes out, she is swept to the brink of the falls, and her lover, exhibiting
the nimblest footwork since Packy McFarland, saves her from annihilation. The
rest of the spool portrays Sanderson, surprisingly natty after his drubbing, of¬
fering his dupe legitimate wedlock and sighing with relief when she disdains him,
and a multiple marriage in which Anna and David, Kate and the Professor, and
Martha and her apple-knocker are united. So ends the morality, with no hard
feelings except in the gluteus, and with that unique sense of degradation that at¬
tends a trip to the movies during daylight.
As it happens, the only known antidote for the foregoing is a double banana split
with oodles of fudge sauce, and immediately on quitting Way Down East I sought
one out at a neighboring drugstore. As I was burrowing into it like a snowplow,
S. J . P e t e 1 m a n
393
I became conscious of the soda jerker’s intent scrutiny. “Say, din I use to see you
around the old Opera House in Providence?” he inquired narrowly. “I took tick¬
ets there when I was a kid.” Judging from the man’s decrepitude, I would have
had to dandle Bronson Alcott on my knee to be his contemporary, but I waived
the point and held still for a spate of theatrical reminiscence. At last, as a sort
of tourniquet, I mentioned Way Down East and suggested he might enjoy seeing
it again. He drew himself up, offended. “Listen, wise guy,” he retorted. “I may
handle slop for a living, but I don’t have to look at it.” I slunk out with flaming
cheeks, made even pinker by the cashier’s recalling me to settle the check. Al¬
together, it was a shattering afternoon. The next time my nobler nature gets the
upper hand, I aim for the nearest Turkish bath.
Genbes
E. M. Forster
"But is Mickey a mouse?" the novelist E. M. Forster (1879—1970) asked. “Certainly one
would not recognize him in a trap."In the early days ojanimation, cartoons by Disney
and others were prized not as family entertainment but as a wholly new art form; the So¬
viet director Eisenstein called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the greatest film ever
made. I remember asking Marcello Mastroianni once what his favorite movie love scene
was. He could think of no candidates. Then suddenly he smiled. “1 like it, "he said, “when
Minnie kisses Mickey, and little red hearts go pop-pop-pop, over their heads, in the air."
“Minnie and Mickey”
I am a film-fanned rather than a film-fan, and oh the things I have had to see and
hear because other people wanted to! About once a fortnight a puff of wind raises
me from the seat where I am meditating upon life or art, and wafts me in ami¬
ability’s name towards a very different receptacle. Call it a fauteuil. Here art is
not, life not. Not happy, not unhappy, 1 sit in an up-to-date stupor, while the
international effort unrolls. American women shoot the hippopotamus with
eyebrows made of platinum. British ladies and gentlemen turn the movies into
the stickies for old Elstree’s sake. Overrated children salute me from Germany
and France, steam-tractors drone across the lengths and breadths of unholy Rus¬
sia, with the monotony of wedding chimes. All around me, I have reason to be¬
lieve, sit many fellow film-fanneds, chaff from the winnowing like myself, but
we do not communicate with one another, and are indistinguishable from ec¬
stasy in the gloom. Stunned by the howls of the Wurlitzer organ, choked by the
fumes of the cigars—and here I break off again, in a style not unsuited to the
subject. Why do cigars and cigarettes in a cinema function like syringes? Why
do they squirt smoke with unerring aim down my distant throat and into my
averted eyes? Where are they coming from? Where are we going to? Before I
397
398 Genre
can decide, the greatest super-novelty of all time has commenced, Ping Pong,
and the toy counter at Gamage’s is exhibited as a prehistoric island. Or mayn’t
I have a good laugh? Why certainly, why sure, that’s what we take your money
for, a good laugh, so here’s a guy who can’t swim and finds he can racing a guy
who can swim and pretends he can’t, and the guy who can’t get a laugh out of
that had better—
But now the attendant beckons, a wraith in beach pyjamas, waving her elec¬
tric wand. She wants someone, and can it be me? No—she wants no one, it is
just a habit she has got into, poor girlie, she cannot stop herself, wave she must,
it is a cinema. And when she is off duty she still cannot stop herself, but fanned
by she knows not what sits skirted and bloused in the audience she lately pa¬
trolled. I do think though—for it is time for optimism to enter—I do think that
she will choose a performance which bills a Mickey Mouse. And I do hope that
Mickey, on his side, will observe her fidelity and will introduce her into his next
Silly Symphony, half-glow-worm and half-newt, waving, waving. . . .
What fun it would be, a performance in which Mickey produced the audi¬
ence as well as the film! Perhaps Mr. Walt Disney will suggest it to him, and I
will provide the title gratis: “Plastic Pools.” We should see some gay sights in
his semidarkness, and more would get squirted about than smoke. Siphons that
pour zig-zag, chocolates exploding into fleas—there are rich possibilities in the
refreshments alone, and when it comes to Miss Cow’s hatpins and fauteuils for
the dachshund sisters, why should there be any limits? Yet I don’t know. Per¬
haps not. “Plastic Pools” is withdrawn. For much as I admire Mickey as a
producer, I like him as a lover most, and rather regret these later and more elab¬
orate efforts, for the reason that they keep him too much from Minnie. Minnie
is his all, his meinie, his moon. Perhaps even the introduction of Pluto was a
mistake. Have you forgotten that day when he and she strolled with their Ko¬
daks through an oriental bazaar, snapping this and that, while their camel drank
beer and galloped off on both its humps across the desert? Have you forgotten
Wild Waves? Mickey’s great moments are moments of heroism, and when he car¬
ries Minnie out of the harem as a pot-plant or rescues her as she falls in foam,
herself its fairest flower, he reaches heights impossible for the entrepreneur. I
would not even have the couple sing. The duets in which they increasingly in¬
dulge are distracting. Let them confine themselves to raptures for mice, and let
them play their piano less.
But is Mickey a mouse? Well, I am hard put to it at moments certainly, and
have had to do some thinking back. Certainly one would not recognize him in
a trap. It is his character rather than his species that signifies, which one could
surely recognize anywhere. He is energetic without being elevating, and although
he is assuredly one of the world’s great lovers he must be placed at some dis¬
tance from Charlie Chaplin or Sir Philip Sidney. No one has ever been softened
E . M. Forster
399
after seeing Mickey or has wanted to give away an extra glass of water to the
poor. He is never sentimental, indeed there is a scandalous element in him which
I find most restful. Why does he not pick up one of the coins thrown to him in
that Texas bar? Why does one of the pillows in Mickey’s Nightmare knock him
down? Why does Pluto—Or there is that moment in Wild Waves when Minnie
through some miscalculation on her part is drowning, and he rushes for a boat.
As he heaves it out of the sand two little blobs are revealed beneath it, creatures
too tiny to be anything but love-items, and they scuttle away into a world which
will scarcely be as severe on them as ours. There are said to be “privately shown”
Mickeys, and though I do not want to see one, imagination being its own king¬
dom, I can well believe that anyone who goes so far goes further.
About Minnie too little has been said, and her name at the top of this article
is an act of homage which ought to have been paid long ago. Nor do we know
anything about her family. When discovered alone, she appears to be of inde¬
pendent means, and to own a small house in the midst of unattractive scenery,
where, with no servant and little furniture, she busies herself about trifles until
Mickey comes. For he is her Rajah, her Sun. Without him, her character shines
not. As he enters she expands, she becomes simple, tender, brave, and strong,
and her coquetterie is of the delightful type which never conceals its object. Ah,
that squeak of greeting! As you will have guessed from it, her only fault is hys¬
teria. Minnie does not always judge justly, and she was ill advised, in Puppy Love,
to make all that fuss over a bone. She ought to have known it belonged to the
dogs. It is possible that, like most of us, she is deteriorating. To be approached
so often by Mickey, and always for the first time, must make any mouse me¬
chanical. Perhaps sometimes she worries whether she has ever been married or
not, and her doubts are not easy to allay, and the wedding chimes in Mickey’s
Nightmare are no guide or a sinister one. Still, it seems likely that they have mar¬
ried one another, since it is unlikely that they have married anyone else, since
there is nobody else for them to marry.
What of their future? At present Mickey is everybody’s god, so that even
members of the Film Society cease despising their fellow members when he ap¬
pears. But gods are not immortal. There was an Egyptian called Bes, who was
once quite as gay, and Brer Rabbit and Felix the Cat have been forgotten too,
and Ganesh is being forgotten. Perhaps he and Minnie will follow them into
oblivion. I do not care two hoots. I am all for the human race. But how fortu¬
nate that it should have been accompanied, down the ages, by so many cheer-
ful animals, and how lucky that the cinema has managed to catch the last of them
in its questionable reels!
4oo
Genre
Andh£
Bazin
Andre Bazin (1918—1958) was the father of the auteur theory of film criticism and the
patron saint of the French New Wave. He was also a kind man who befriended the
confused and rebellious young Franfois Truffaut and set him on the path towardfilm crit¬
icism and directing. Bazin’s great gift was the ability to look at discredited genres, espe¬
ciallyfrom Hollywood, and see beneath the cliches and convention an artistic hand that
touched thefilms of some directors and not those of others.
“The Western: or the American
Film par Excellence ”
The western is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of
the cinema itself and which is as alive as ever after almost half a century of un¬
interrupted success. Even if one disputes the quality of its inspiration and of its
style since the thirties, one is amazed at the steady commercial success which is
the measure of its health. Doubtless the western has not entirely escaped the evo¬
lution of cinema taste—or indeed taste, period. It has been and will again be
subjected to influences from the outside—for instance the crime novel, the de¬
tective story, or the social problems of the day—and its simplicity and strict form
have suffered as a result. We may be entitled to regret this, but not to see in it
a state of decay. These influences are only felt in a few productions of relatively
high standing and do not affect the low-budget films aimed principally at the
home market. Furthermore, it is as important for us to marvel at the western’s
capacity to resist them as to deplore these passing moments of contamination.
Every influence acts on them like a vaccine. The microbe, on contact, loses its
deadly virulence. In the course of fifteen years, the American comedy has ex¬
hausted its resources. If it survives in an occasional success, it is only to the ex-
Andre Bazin
4 °
tent that, in some way, it abandons the rules that before the war made for suc¬
cessful comedy. From Underworld (192 7) to Scarf ace (1932) the gangster film had
already completed the cycle of its growth. The scenarios of detective stories have
developed rapidly, and if it is still possible to rediscover an aesthetic of violence
within the framework of the criminal adventure which they share with Sea face,
we would be hard put to see in the private eye, the journalist, or the G-man the
reflection of the original hero. Furthermore, if there is such a genre as the Amer¬
ican detective film one cannot attribute to it the independent identity of the
western; the literature which preceded it has continued to influence it, and
the latest interesting variants of the crime film derive directly from it.
On the contrary, the durability of the western heroes and plots has been
demonstrated recently by the fabulous success on television of the old Hopa-
long Cassidy films. The western does not age.
Its world-wide appeal is even more astonishing than its historical survival.
What can there possibly be to interest Arabs, Hindus, Latins, Germans, or
Anglo-Saxons, among whom the western has had an uninterrupted success,
about evocations of the birth of the United States of America, the struggle be¬
tween Buffalo Bill and the Indians, the laying down of the railroad, or the Civil
War!
The western must possess some greater secret than simply the secret of
youthfulness. It must be a secret that somehow identifies it with the essence of
cinema.
It is easy to say that because the cinema is movement the western is cinema par
excellence. It is true that galloping horses and fights are its usual ingredients. But
in that case the western would simply be one variety of adventure story. Again,
the continuous movement of the characters, carried almost to a pitch of frenzy,
is inseparable from its geographical setting and one might just as well define the
western by its set—the frontier town and its landscapes; but other genres and
schools of filmmaking have made use of the dramatic poetry of the lands
cape, for example the silent Swedish film, but although it contributed to their
greatness it did not insure their survival. Better still, sometimes, as in The Over¬
landers, a western theme is borrowed—in this case the traditional cattle drive—
and set in a landscape, central Australia, reasonably like the American West. The
result, as we know, was excellent. But fortunately no attempt was made to fol¬
low up this paradoxical achievement, whose success was due to an unusual com¬
bination of circumstances. If in fact westerns have been shot in France against
the landscapes of the Camargue, one can only see in this an additional proof of
the popularity and healthiness of a genre that can survive counterfeiting, pas¬
tiche, or even parody.
4 ° 2 Genre
It would be hopeless to try to reduce the essence of the western to one or
other of these manifest components. The same ingredients are to be found else¬
where but not the same benefits that appear to go with them. Therefore, the
western must be something else again than its form. Galloping horses, fights,
strong and brave men in a wildly austere landscape could not add up to a defi¬
nition of the genre nor encompass its charms.
Those formal attributes by which one normally recognizes the western are
simply signs or symbols of its profound reality, namely the myth. The western
was bom of an encounter between a mythology and a means of expression: the
saga of the West existed before the cinema in literary or folklore form, and the
multiplication of western films has not killed off western literature which still
retains its public, and continues to provide screenwriters with their best mate¬
rial. But there is no common measure between the limited and national audi¬
ence for western stories and the worldwide audience for the films which they
inspire. Just as the miniatures of the Books of Hours served as models for the stat¬
uary and the stained-glass windows of the cathedrals, this western literature,
freed from the bonds of language, finds a distribution on the screen in keeping
with its size—almost as if the dimensions of the image had become one with those
of the imagination.
This book [J.—L. Rieupeyrout’s La Grande Adventure du western 1894—1964,
for which Bazin was here writing the Preface] will emphasize a little-known as¬
pect of the western: its faithfulness to history. This is not generally recog¬
nized—primarily, doubtless, because of our ignorance, but still more because
of the deeply rooted prejudice according to which the western can only tell ex¬
tremely puerile stories, fruits of a naive power of invention that does not con¬
cern itself with psychological, historical, or even material verisimilitude. True,
few westerns are explicitly concerned with historical accuracy. True, too, these
are not the only ones of any value. It would be absurd to judge the characters
of Tom Mix—still more of his magic white horse—or even of William Hart or
Douglas Fairbanks, all of whom made lovely films in the great primitive period
of the western, by the yardstick of archeology.
Af ter all, many current westerns of honor able standing—I am thinking of Be¬
yond the Great Divide, Yellow Sky, or High Noon —have only a tenuous relation to
historical fact. They are primarily works of imagination. But one would be as
much in error not to recognize the historical references in the western as to deny
the unabashed freedom of its screenplays. J.—L. Rieupeyrout gives a complete
account of the birth of its epiclike idealization, based on comparatively recent
history, yet it could be that his study, concerned to recall to us what is ordi¬
narily forgotten, or even not known, and confining itself to films that justify his
thesis, discards by implication the other side of the aesthetic reality. Still, this
would show him to be doubly right. For the relations between the facts of his-
Andre Bazin
403
tory and the western are not immediate and direct, but dialectic. Tom Mix is
the opposite of Abraham Lincoln, but after his own fashion he perpetuates Lin¬
coln’s cult and his memory. In its most romantic or most naive form, the west¬
ern is the opposite of a historical reconstruction. There is no difference between
Hopalong Cassidy and Tarzan except for their costume and the arena in which
they demonstrate their prowess. However, if one wanted to take the trouble to
compare these delightful but unlikely stories and to superimpose on them, as is
done in modern physiognomy, a number of negatives of faces, an ideal western
would come through, composed of all the constants common to one and to the
other: a western made up solely of unalloyed myth. Let us take one example,
that of the woman.
In the first third of the film, the good cowboy meets the pure young woman—
the good and strong virgin, let us call her—with whom he falls in love. Despite
its chasteness we are able to guess this love is shared. However, virtually insur¬
mountable obstacles stand in its way. One of the most significant and most fre¬
quent comes from the family of the beloved—for example, her brother is a
sinister scoundrel and the good cowboy is forced to rid society of him, man to
man. A modem Chimene, our heroine refuses to see in her brother’s assassin
any sort of a fine fellow. In order to redeem himself in his charmer’s eyes and
merit forgiveness, our knight must now pass through a series of fabulous trials.
He ends by saving his elected bride from a danger that could be fatal to her per¬
son, her virtue, her fortune, or all three at once. Following which, since we are
now near the end of the film, the damsel would indeed be ungrateful if she did
not feel that her suitor had repaid his debt, and allow him to start dreaming of
lots of children.
Up to this point, this outline into which one can weave a thousand variants—
for example, by substituting the Civil War for the Indian threat, cattle rustlers—
comes close to reminding us of the medieval courtly romances by virtue of the
preeminence given to the woman and the trials that the finest of heroes must
undergo in order to qualify for her love.
But the story is often complicated by a paradoxical character—the saloon B-
girl—who as a rule, is also in love with the cowboy. So there would be one
woman too many if the god of the screenwriter was not keeping watch. A few
minutes before the end, the prostitute with the heart of gold rescues the man
she loves from some danger or another, sacrificing her life and her hopeless love
for the happiness of her cowboy. This also serves to redeem her in the eyes of
the spectators.
There is food for thought here. Note, first of all, that the distinction between
good and bad applies only to the men. Women, all up and down the social scale,
are in every case worthy of love or at least of esteem or pity. The least little pros¬
titute is redeemed by love and death—although she is spared the latter in Stage-
404
Genre
coach with its resemblance to de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif. It is true that the
good cowboy is more or less a reformed offender so that henceforth the most
moral of marriages with his heroine becomes possible.
Furthermore, in the world of the western, it is the women who are good
and the men who are bad, so bad that the best of them must redeem themselves
from the original sin of their sex by undergoing various trials. In the Garden of
Eden, Eve led Adam into temptation. Paradoxically Anglo-Saxon puritanism,
under the pressure of historical circumstances, reverses the Biblical situation.
The downfall of the woman only comes about as a result of the concupiscence
of men.
Clearly, this theory derives from the actual sociological conditions obtaining
in primitive western society which, because of the scarcity of women and the
perils of a too harsh existence in this burgeoning world, make it imperative to
safeguard its female members and its horses. Hanging was considered enough
punishment for stealing a horse. To engender respect for women more was
needed than the fear of a risk as trifling as the loss of one’s life, namely the pos¬
itive power of a myth. The myth of the western illustrates, and both initiates
and confirms woman in her role as vestal of the social virtues, of which this
chaotic world is so greatly in need. Within her is concealed the physical future,
and, by way of the institution of the family to which she aspires as the root is
drawn to the earth, its moral foundation.
These myths, of which we have just examined what is perhaps the most sig¬
nificant example (the next is the myth of the horse) may themselves doubtless
be reduced to an even more essential principle. Basically each of these particu¬
larize, by way of an already specific dramatic plot, the great epic Manicheism
which sets the forces of evil over against the knights of the true cause. These im¬
mense stretches of prairie, of deserts, of rocks to which the little wooden town
clings precariously (a primitive amoeba of a civilization), are exposed to all man¬
ner of possible things. The Indian, who lived in this world, was incapable ofim-
posing on it man’s order. He mastered it only by identifying himself with its
pagan savagery. The white Christian on the contrary is truly the conqueror of a
new world. The grass sprouts where his horse has passed. He imposes simulta¬
neously his moral and his technical order, the one linked to the other and the
former guaranteeing the latter. The physical safety of the stagecoaches, the pro¬
tection given by the federal troops, the building of the great railroads are less
important perhaps than the establishment of justice and respect for the law. The
relations between morality and law, which in our ancient civilization are just a
subject for an undergraduate paper, were half a century ago the most vital thing
confronting the youthful United States. Only strong, rough, and courageous men
could tame these virgin lands. Everyone knows that familiarity with death does
not keep alive the fear of hell, nor do scruples or moral debate. Policemen and
Andre Bazin
4 os
judges are of most help to the weak. It was the force of this conquering humanity
that constituted its weakness. Where individual morality is precarious it is only
law that can impose the order of the good and the good of order.
But the law is unjust to the extent that it pretends to guarantee a moral so¬
ciety but ignores the individual merits of those who constitute that society. If it
is to be effective, this justice must be dispensed by men who are just as strong
and just as daring as the criminals. These virtues, as we have said, are in no way
compatible with virtue in the absolute sense. The sheriff is not always a better
person than the man he hangs. This begets and establishes an inevitable and nec¬
essary contradiction. There is often little moral difference between the outlaw
and the man who operates within the law. Still, the sheriff s star must be seen
as constituting a sacrament of justice, whose worth does not depend on the wor¬
thiness of the man who administers it. To this first contradiction a second must
be added, the administration of justice which, if it is to be effective, must be
drastic and speedy—short of lynching, however—and thus must ignore exten¬
uating circumstances, such as alibis that would take too long to verify. In pro¬
tecting society, such a form of justice runs the risk of unkindness to the most
turbulent though not perhaps the least useful nor even the least deserving of its
children.
Although the need for law was never more clearly allied to the need for moral¬
ity, at the same time never was their antagonism more concrete and more
evident. It is this which provides a basis, within a slapstick framework, for Char¬
lie’s Pilgrim, at the conclusion of which we see our hero riding his horse along
the borderline between good and evil, which also happens to be the Mexican
border.
John Ford’s Stagecoach, which is a fine dramatic illustration of the parable of
the pharisee and the publican, demonstrates that a prostitute can be more re¬
spectable than the narrow-minded people who drove her out of town and just
as respectable as an officer’s wife; that a dissolute gambler knows how to die
with all the dignity of an aristocrat; that an alcoholic doctor can practice his pro¬
fession with competence and devotion; that an outlaw who is being sought for
the payment of past and possibly future debts can show loyalty, generosity,
courage, and refinement, whereas a banker of considerable standing and repu¬
tation runs off with the cashbox.
So we find at the source of the western the ethics of the epic and even of
tragedy. The western is in the epic category because of the superhuman level of
its heroes and the legendary magnitude of their feats of valor. Billy the Kid is as
invulnerable as Achilles and his revolver is infallible. The cowboy is a knight-at-
arms. The style of the mise en scene is in keeping with the character of the hero.
A transformation into an epic is evident in the set-ups of the shots, with their
predilection for vast horizons, all-encompassing shots that constantly bring to
406
Genre
mind the conflict between man and nature. The western has virtually no use for
the closeup, even for the medium shot, preferring by contrast the traveling shot
and the pan which refuse to be limited by the frameline and which restore to
space its fullness.
True enough. But this epic style derives its real meaning only from the moral¬
ity which underlies and justifies it. It is the morality of a world in which social
good and evil, in their simplicity and necessity, exist like two primary and basic
elements. But good in its natal state engenders law in all its primitive rigor; epic
becomes tragedy, on the appearance of the first conflict between the transcen¬
dence of social justice and the individual character of moral justice, between the
categorical imperative of the law which guarantees the order of the future city,
and the no less unshakeable order of the individual conscience.
The Comeille-like simplicity of western scripts has often been a subject for
parody. It is easy to see the analogy between them and the text of Le Cid: there
is the same conflict between love and duty, the same knightly ordeals on the
completion of which the wise virgin will consent to forget the insult to her fam¬
ily; the same chaste sentiments which are based on a concept of love subordi¬
nated to respect for the laws of society and morality. But this comparison is
double-edged: to make fun of the western by comparing it to Corneille is also
to draw attention to its greatness, a greatness near perhaps to the child-like, just
as childhood is near to poetry.
Let there be no doubt about it. This naive greatness is recognized in west¬
erns by simple men in every clime—together with the children—despite dif¬
ferences of language, landscape, customs, and dress. The epic and tragic hero is
a universal character. The Civil War is part of nineteenth century history, the
western has turned it into the Trojan War of the most modern of epics. The mi¬
gration to the West is our Odyssey.
Not only is the historicity of the-western not at odds with the no less evident
penchant of the genre for outlandish situations, exaggerations of fact and the use
of the deus ex machina (in short, everything that makes for improbability); it is,
on the contrary, the foundation of its aesthetic and its psychology. The history
of film has only known one other epic cinema and that too is a historical cin¬
ema. Our purpose here is not to compare epic form in the Russian and in the
American film, and yet an analysis of their styles would shed an unexpected light
on the historical meaning of the events reconstructed in the two of them. Our
only purpose is to point out that it is not their closeness to the facts that has given
them their styles. There are legends that come into being almost instantaneously,
that half a generation suffices to ripen into an epic. Like the conquest of the W est,
the Soviet revolution is a collection of historical events which signal the birth of
a new order and a new civilization. Both have begotten the myths necessary for
the confirmation of history, both had to reinvent a morality to rediscover at their
Robert W a r s b ow
407
living source and before mixture or pollution took place, the foundation of the
law which would make order out of chaos, separate heaven from earth. But per¬
haps the cinema was the only language capable of expressing this, above all of
giving it its true aesthetic dimension. Without the cinema the conquest of the
West would have left behind, in the shape of the western story, only a minor
literature, and it is neither by its painting nor its novels that Soviet art has given
the world a picture of its grandeur. The fact is that henceforth the cinema is the
specifically epic art.
Robert Warshow
I read Warshow’s book The Immediate Experience soon after starting to work as a film
critic and have always remembered two sentences in particular: “A man goes to the movies.
The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man."In other words, a review
must reflect one’s actual experience at the movies, not that experiencefiltered through ide¬
ology, fashion, or political correctness. In this view of the gangster movie, that is what
Warshow does, seeing clearly the meaning of what was, when he wrote, a problematic genre.
“The Gangster as Tragic Hero”
America, as a social and political organization, is committed to a cheerful view
of life. It could not be otherwise. The sense of tragedy is a luxury of aristocratic
societies, where the fate of the individual is not conceived of as having a direct
and legitimate political importance, being determined by a fixed and supra-
political—that is, non-controversial—moral order or fate. Modern equalitar-
ian societies, however, whether democratic or authoritarian in their political
forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier;
the avowed function of the modem state, at least in its ultimate terms, is not
only to regulate social relations, but also to determine the quality and the pos-
4°8 Genre
sibilities of human life in general. Happiness thus becomes the chief political
issue—in a sense, the only political issue—and for that reason it can never be
treated as an issue at all. If an American or a Russian is unhappy, it implies a cer¬
tain reprobation of his society, and therefore, by a logic of which we can all rec¬
ognize the necessity, it becomes an obligation of citizenship to be cheerful; if
the authorities find it necessary, the citizen may even be compelled to make a
public display of his cheerfulness on important occasions, just as he may be con¬
scripted into the army in time of war.
Naturally, this civic responsibility rests most strongly upon the organs of mass
culture. The individual citizen may still be permitted his private unhappiness so
long as it does not take on political significance, the extent of this tolerance being
determined by how large an area of private life the society can accommodate.
But every production of mass culture is a public act and must conform with ac¬
cepted notions of the public good. Nobody seriously questions the principle that
it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly no¬
body in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.* At a time
when the normal condition of the citizen is a state of anxiety, euphoria spreads
over our culture like the broad smile of an idiot. In terms of attitudes towards
life, there is very little difference between a “happy” movie like Good News,
which ignores death and suffering, and a “sad” movie like A Tree Grows in Brook¬
lyn, which uses death and suffering as incidents in the service of a higher opti¬
mism.
But, whatever its effectiveness as a source of consolation and a means of pres¬
sure for maintaining “positive” social attitudes, this optimism is fundamentally
satisfying to no one, not even to those who would be most disoriented without
its support. Even within the area of mass culture, there always exists a current
of opposition, seeking to express by whatever means are available to it that sense
of desperation and inevitable failure which optimism itself helps to create. Most
often, this opposition is confined to rudimentary or semiliterate forms: in mob
politics and journalism, for example, or in certain kinds of religious enthusiasm.
When it does enter the field of art, it is likely to be disguised or attenuated: in
an unspecific form of expression like jazz, in the basically harmless nihilism of
the Marx Brothers, in the continually reasserted strain of hopelessness that often
seems to be the real meaning of the soap opera. The gangster film is remarkable
in that it fills the need for disguise (though not sufficiently to avoid arousing un¬
easiness) without requiring any serious distortion. From its beginnings, it has
♦In her testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Mrs. Leila Rogers said that the movie
None but the Lonely Heart was un-American because it was gloomy. Like so much else that was said during the un¬
happy investigation of Hollywood, this statement was at once stupid and illuminating. One knew immediately what
Mrs. Rogers was talking about; she had simply been insensitive enough to carry her philistinism to its conclusion.
Robert Warshow 409
been a consistent and astonishingly complete presentation of the modem sense
of tragedy.*
In its initial character, the gangster film is simply one example of the movies’
constant tendency to create fixed dramatic patterns that can be repeated indef-
initely with a reasonable expectation of profit. One gangster film follows an¬
other as one musical or one Western follows another. But this rigidity is not
necessarily opposed to the requirements of art. There have been very success¬
ful types of art in the past which developed such specific and detailed conven¬
tions as almost to make individual examples of the type interchangeable. This is
true, f or example, of Elizabethan revenge tragedy and Restoration comedy.
For such a type to be successful means that its conventions have imposed
themselves upon the general consciousness and become the accepted vehicles
of a particular set of attitudes and a particular aesthetic effect. One goes to any
individual example of the type with very definite expectations, and originality
is to be welcomed only in the degree that it intensifies the expected experience
without fundamentally altering it. Moreover, the relationship between the
conventions which go to make up such a type and the real experience of its au¬
dience or the real facts of whatever situation it pretends to describe is of only
secondary importance and does not determine its aesthetic force. It is only in
an ultimate sense that the type appeals to its audience’s experience of reality;
much more immediately, it appeals to previous experience of the type itself: it
creates its own field of reference.
Thus the importance of the gangster film, and the nature and intensity of its
emotional and aesthetic impact, cannot be measured in terms of the place of the
gangster himself or the importance of the problem of crime in American life.
Those European movie-goers who think there is a gangster on every corner in
New York are certainly deceived, but defenders of the “positive” side of Amer¬
ican culture are equally deceived if they think it relevant to point out that most
Americans have never seen a gangster. What matters is that the experience of
the gangster as an experience of art is universal to Americans. There is almost noth¬
ing we understand better or react to more readily or with quicker intelligence.
The Western film, though it seems never to diminish in popularity, is for most
of us no more than the folklore of the past, familiar and understandable only be¬
cause it has been repeated so often. The gangster film comes much closer. In
ways that we do not easily or willingly define, the gangster speaks for us, ex¬
pressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the de¬
mands of modem life, which rejects “Americanism” itself.
♦Efforts have been made from time to time to bring the gangster film into line with the prevailing optimism and
social constructiveness of our culture; Kiss of Death is a recent example. These efforts are usually unsuccessful; the
reasons for their lack of success are interesting in themselves, but I shall not be able to discuss them here.
4 io
Genre
The gangster is the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge,
with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring, carrying his life in his
hands like a placard, like a club. For everyone else, there is at least the theo¬
retical possibility of another world—in that happier American culture which the
gangster denies, the city does not really exist; it is only a more crowded and
more brightly lit country—but for the gangster there is only the city; he must
inhabit it in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad
city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern
world. And the gangster—though there are real gangsters—is also, and pri¬
marily, a creature of the imagination. The real city, one might say, produces only
criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster: he is what we want to be
and what we are afraid we may become.
Thrown into the crowd without background or advantages, with only those
ambiguous skills which the rest of us—the real people of the real city—can only
pretend to have, the gangster is required to make his way, to make his life and
impose it on others. Usually, when we come upon him, he has already made his
choice or the choice has already been made for him, it doesn’t matter which:
we are not permitted to ask whether at some point he could have chosen to be
something else than what he is.
The gangster’s activity is actually a form of rational enterprise, involving fairly
definite goals and various techniques for achieving them. But this rationality is
usually no more than a vague background; we know, perhaps, that the gangster
sells liquor or that he operates a numbers racket; often we are not given even
that much information. So his activity becomes a kind of pure criminality: he
hurts people. Certainly our response to the gangster film is most consistently
and most universally a response to sadism; we gain the double satisfaction of par¬
ticipating vicariously in the gangster’s sadism and then seeing it turned against
the gangster himself.
But on another level the quality of irrational brutality and the quality of ra¬
tional enterprise become one. Since we do not see the rational and routine as¬
pects of the gangster’s behavior, the practice of brutality—the quality of unmixed
criminality—becomes the totality of his career. At the same time, we are al¬
ways conscious that the whole meaning of this career is a drive for success: the
typical gangster film presents a steady upward progress followed by a very pre¬
cipitate fall. Thus brutality itself becomes at once the means to success and the
content of success—a success that is defined in its most general terms, not as
accomplishment or specific gain, but simply as the unlimited possibility of ag¬
gression. (In the same way, film presentations of businessmen tend to make it
appear that they achieve their success by talking on the telephone and holding
conf erences and that success is talking on the telephone and holding conferences.)
From this point of view, the initial contact between the film and its audience
Robert Wa rs h ow
41 1
is an agreed conception of human life: that man is a being with the possibilities
of success or failure. This principle, too, belongs to the city; one must emerge
from the crowd or else one is nothing. On that basis the necessity of the action
is established, and it progresses by inalterable paths to the point where the gang¬
ster lies dead and the principle has been modified: there is really only one pos¬
sibility—failure. The final meaning of the city is anonymity and death.
In the opening scene of Scarface, we are shown a successful man; we know he
is successful because he has just given a party of opulent proportions and because
he is called Big Louie. Through some monstrous lack of caution, he permits him¬
self to be alone for a few moments. We understand from this immediately that
he is about to be killed. No convention of the gangster film is more strongly es¬
tablished than this: it is dangerous to be alone. And yet the very conditions of
success make it impossible not to be alone, for success is always the establish¬
ment of an individual pre-eminence that must be imposed on others, in whom
it automatically arouses hatred; the successful man is an outlaw. The gangster’s
whole life is an effort to assert himself as an individual, to draw himself out of
the crowd, and he always dies because he is an individual; the final bullet thrusts
him back, makes him, after all, a failure. “Mother of God,” says the dying Lit¬
tle Caesar, “is this the end of Rico?”—speaking of himself thus in the third per¬
son because what has been brought low is not the undifferentiated man, but the
individual with a name, the gangster, the success; even to himself he is a crea¬
ture of the imagination. (T. S. Eliot has pointed out that a number of Shake¬
speare’s tragic heroes have this trick of looking at themselves dramatically; their
true identity, the thing that is destroyed when they die, is something outside
themselves—not a man, but a style of life, a kind of meaning.)
A t bottom, the gangster i s doomed because h e i s under the obligation to suc¬
ceed, not because the means he employs are unlawful. In the deeper layers of
the modern consciousness, all means are unlawful, every attempt to succeed is
an act of aggression, leaving one alone and guilty and defenseless among ene¬
mies: one is punished for success. This is our intolerable dilemma: that failure is
a kind of death and success is evil and dangerous, is—ultimately—impossible.
The effect of the gangster film is to embody this dilemma in the person of the
gangster and resolve it by his death. The dilemma is resolved because it is his
death, not ours. We are safe; for the moment, we can acquiesce in our failure,
we can choose to fail.
41 2
Genre
Manny Farber.
Manny Farber is a San Diego—based painter who has worked in many other fields and has
written a lot of film criticism for art magazines. His collected essays ("Negative Space)
are provocative and quirky and cause you suddenly to see movies from unexpected angles.
This piece, titled "Underground Films,"was published in 19 S 7 < bfore the term took on
its 1960s connotation of low-budget 8 and 16 mm experimental films. What he is actu¬
ally describing here is the kind of Hollywood film that came to be valued by the auteur
critics, although he has arrived at his own auteur theory by other roads and entirely on
his own terms. He is writing an elegy for spare, muscular, non-self-conscious male-oriented
action movies, the "itch houses" where they played, and the audiences that sought them
therefor all sorts of reasons, none of them having to do with Art. His championing of the
values of Hawks, Wellman, Sturges, and Aldrich—which were taken up by countless other
writers after Andrew Sarris brought the auteur theory to America—was original and new
when he wrote it, as was his gritty style, which seems to have been scratched out by the
kind of person who already knew what those movies were telling him.
“Underground Films”
The saddest thing in current films is watching the long-neglected action direc¬
tors fade away as the less talented De Sicas and Zinnemanns continue to fas¬
cinate the critics. Because they played an anti-art role in Hollywood, the true
masters of the male action film—such soldier-cowboy-gangster directors as
Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, William Wellman, William Keighley, the early,
pre-Stagecoach John Ford, Anthony Mann—have turned out a huge amount of
unprized, second-gear celluloid. Their neglect becomes more painful to behold
now that the action directors are in decline, many of them having abandoned
the dry, economic, life-worn movie style that made their observations of the
American he-man so rewarding. Americans seem to have a special aptitude for
Man ny F a rber
4 i 3
allowing History to bury the toughest, most authentic native talents. The same
tide that has swept away Otis Ferguson, Walker Evans, Val Lewton, Clarence
Williams, and J. R. Williams into near oblivion is now in the process of bury¬
ing a group that kept an endless flow of interesting roughneck film passing
through the theaters from the depression onward. The tragedy of these film¬
makers lies in their having been consigned to a Sargasso Sea of unmentioned tal¬
ent by film reviewers whose sole concern is not continuous flow of quality but
the momentary novelties of the particular film they are reviewing.
Howard Hawks is the key figure in the male action film because he shows a
maximum speed, inner life, and view, with the least amount of flat foot. His
best films, which have the swallowed-up intricacy of a good soft-shoe dance, are
Scarface, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, and The Big Sleep. Raoul Walsh’s
films are melancholy masterpieces of flexibility and detailing inside a lower-
middle-class locale. Walsh’s victories, which make use of tense, broken-field
journeys and nostalgic background detail, include They Drive by Night, White Heat,
and Roaring Twenties. In any Bill Wellman operation, there are at least four di¬
rectors—a sentimentalist, deep thinker, hooey vaudevillian, and an expedient
short-cut artist, whose special love is for mulish toughs expressing themselves
in drop-kicking heads and somber standing around. W ellman is at his best in stiff,
vulgar, low-pulp material. In that setup, he has a low-budget ingenuity, which
creates flashes of ferocious brassiness, an authentic practical-joke violence (as in
the frenzied inadequacy of Ben Blue in Roxie Hart) , and a brainless hell-raising.
Anthony Mann’s inhumanity to man, in which cold mortal intentness is the trade¬
mark effect, can be studied best in The Tall Target, Winchester 73, Border Incident,
and Railroaded. The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, cater¬
pillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human
body. Mann has done interesting work with scissors, a cigarette lighter, and
steam, but his most bizarre effect takes place in a taxidermist’s shop. By intri¬
cate manipulation of athletes’ bodies, Mann tries to ram the eyes of his com¬
batants on the horns of a stuffed deer stuck on the wall.
The film directors mentioned above did their best work in the late 1940’s,
when it was possible to be a factory of unpretentious picture-making without
frightening the front office. During the same period and later, less prolific di¬
rectors also appear in the Uncompromising action film. Of these, the most im¬
portant is John Farrow, an urbane vaudevillian whose forte, in films like The Big
Clock and His Kind of Woman, is putting a fine motoring system beneath the veer¬
ing slapstick of his eccentric characterizations. Though he has tangled with such
heavyweights as Book-of-the-Month and Hemingway, Zoltan Korda is an au¬
thentic hard-grain cheapster telling his stories through unscrubbed action, mas¬
culine characterization, and violent explorations inside a fascinating locale.
Korda’s best films— Sahara, Counterattack, Cry the Beloved Country —are strangely
4 i4
Genre
active films in which terrain, jobs, and people get curiously interwoven in a
ravening tactility. William Keighley, in G-Men and Each Dawn I Die, is the least
sentimental director of gangster careers. After the bloated philosophical safe¬
crackers in Huston’s Asphalt Jungle, the smallish cops and robbers in Keighley’s
work seem life-size. Keighley’s handling is so right in emphasis, timing, and
shrewdness that there is no feeling of the director breathing, gasping, snoring
over the film.
The tight-lipped creators whose films are mentioned above comprise the most
interesting group to appear in American culture since the various groupings that
made the 1920’s an explosive era in jazz, literature, silent films. Hawks and his
group are perfect examples of the anonymous artist, who is seemingly afraid of
the polishing, hypocrisy, bragging, fake educating that goes on in serious art.
To go at his most expedient gait, the Hawks type must take a withdrawn, al¬
most hidden stance in the industry. Thus, his films seem to come from the most
neutral, humdrum, monotonous corner of the movie lot. The fascinating thing
about these veiled operators is that they are able to spring the leanest, shrewdest,
sprightliest notes from material that looks like junk, and from a creative posi¬
tion that, on the surface, seems totally uncommitted and disinterested. With
striking photography, a good car for natural dialogue, an eye for realistic detail,
a skilled inside-action approach to composition, and the most politic hand in the
movie field, the action directors have done a forbidding stenography on the hard-
boiled American handyman as he progresses through the years.
It is not too remarkable that the underground films, with their twelve-year-
old’s adventure-story plot and endless palpitating movement, have lost out in
the film system. Their dismissal has been caused by the construction of solid con¬
fidence built by daily and weekly reviewers. Operating with this wall, the critic
can pick and discard without the slightest worry about looking silly. His choice
of best salami is a picture backed by studio build-up, agreement amongst his
colleagues, a layout in Life mag (which makes it officially reasonable for an
American award), and a list of ingredients that anyone’s unsophisticated aunt in
Oakland can spot as comprising a distinguished film. This prize picture, which
has philosophical undertones, pan-fried domestic sights, risque crevices, sporty
actors and actresses, circuslike gymnastics, a bit of tragedy like the main fall at
Niagara, has every reason to be successful. It has been made for that purpose.
Thus, the year’s winner is a perfect film made up solely of holes and evasions,
covered up by all types of padding and plush. The cavity-filling varies from one
prize work to another, from High Noon (cross-eyed artistic views of a clock, sil¬
houettes against a vaulting sky, legend-toned walking, a big song), through From
Here to Eternity (Sinatra’s private scene-chewing, pretty trumpeting, tense shots
in the dark and at twilight, necking near the water, a threatening hand with a
broken bottle) to next year’s winner, which will probably be a huge ball of cot-
Manny F arber
+ 'S
ton candy containing either Audrey Hepburn’s cavernous grin and stiff behind
or more of Zinnemann’s glaceed picture-making. In terms of imaginative pho¬
tography, honest acting, and insight into American life, there is no comparison
between an average underground triumph (Thenix City Story ) and the trivia that
causes a critical salaam across the land. The trouble is that no one asks the crit¬
ics’ alliance to look straight backward at its “choices,” for example, a horse-drawn
truckload of liberal schmaltz called The Best Years of Our Lives. These ridiculously
maltreated films sustain their place in the halls of fame simply because they bear
the label of ART in every inch of their reelage. Praising these solemn goiters has
produced a climate in which the underground picture-maker, with his modest
entry and soft-shoe approach, can barely survive.
However, any day now, Americans may realize that scrambling after the ob¬
vious in art is a losing game. The sharpest work of the last thirty years is to be
found by studying the most unlikely, self-destroying, uncompromising, round¬
about artists. When the day comes for praising infamous men of art, some great
talent will be shown in true light: people like Weldon Kees, the rangy Margie
Israel, James Agee, Isaac Rosenfeld, Otis Ferguson, Val Lewton, a dozen comic-
strip geniuses like the creator of “Harold Teen,” and finally a half-dozen direc¬
tors such as the master of the ambulance, speedboat, flying-saucer movie:
Howard Hawks.
The films of the Hawks-Wellman group are underground f or more reasons than
the fact that the director hides out in subsurface reaches of his work. The hard¬
bitten action film finds its natural home in caves: the murky, congested theaters,
looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus termi¬
nals in big cities. These theaters roll action films in what, at first, seems like a
nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints that seem overgrown with
jungle moss, sound tracks infected with hiccups. The spectator watches two or
three action films go by and leaves feeling as though he were a pirate discharged
from a giant sponge.
The cutthroat atmosphere in the itch house is reproduced in the movies
shown there. Hawks’s The Big Sleep not only has a slightly gaseous, subsurface,
Baghdadish background, but its gangster action is engineered with a suave, cut¬
ting efficacy. Walsh’s Roaring Twenties is a jangling barrelhouse film, which starts
with a top gun bouncing downhill, and, at the end, he is seen slowly pushing his
way through a lot of Campbell’s scotch broth. Wellman’s favorite scene is a
group of hard-visaged ball bearings standing around—for no damned reason and
with no indication of how long or for what reason they have been standing. His
worst pictures are made up simply of this moody, wooden standing around. All
that saves the films are the little flurries of bulletlike acting that give the men an
inner look of credible orneriness and somewhat stupid mulishness. Mann likes
to stretch his victims in crucifix poses against the wall or ground and then to
Genre
41 6
peer intently at their demise with an icy surgeon’s eye. Just as the harrowing
machine is about to run over the wetback on a moonlit night, the camera catches
him sprawled out in a harrowing image. At heart, the best action films are slic¬
ing journeys into the lower depths of American life: dregs, outcasts, lonely hard
wanderers caught in a buzzsaw of niggardly, intricate, devious movement.
The projects of the underground directors are neither experimental, liberal,
slick, spectacular, low-budget, epical, improving, or flagrantly commercial like
Sam Katzman two-bitters. They are faceless movies, taken from a type of half-
polished trash writing, that seem like a mixture of Burt L. Standish, Max Brand,
and Raymond Chandler. Tight, cliche-ridden melodramas about stock muscle¬
men. A stool pigeon gurgling with scissors in his back; a fat, nasal-voiced gang
leader; escaped convicts; power-mad ranch owners with vengeful siblings; a
mean gun with an Oedipus complex and migraine headaches; a crooked gam¬
bler trading guns to the redskins; exhausted GI’s; an incompetent kid hoodlum
hiding out in an East Side building; a sickly-elegant Italian barber in a plot to kill
Lincoln; an underpaid shamus signing up to stop the blackmailing of a tough mil¬
lionaire’s depraved thumb-sucking daughter.
The action directors accept the role of hack so that they can involve them¬
selves with expedience and tough-guy insight in all types of action: barnstorm¬
ing, driving, bulldogging. The important thing is not so much the banal-seeming
journeys to nowhere that make up the stories, but the tunneling that goes on
inside the classic Western-gangster incidents and stock hoodlum-dogface-
cowboy types. For instance, Wellman’s lean, elliptical talents for creating brassy
cheapsters and making gloved references to death, patriotism, masturbation, sug¬
gest that he uses private runways to the truth, while more famous directors take
a slow, embalming surface route.
The virtues of action films expand as the pictures take on the outer appear¬
ance of junk jewelry. The underground’s greatest mishaps have occurred in art-
infected projects where there is unlimited cash, studio freedom, an expansive
story, message, heart, and a lot of prestige to be gained. Their flattest, most sen¬
timental works are incidentally the only ones that have attained the almond-
paste-flavored eminence of the Museum of Modern Art’s film library, i.e., G 1
Joe, Public Enemy. Both Hawks and Wellman, who made these overweighted mis¬
takes, are like basketball’s comer man: their best shooting is done from the deep¬
est, worst angle. With material that is hopelessly worn out and childish (Only
Angels Have Wings), the underground director becomes beautifully graphic and
modestly human in his flexible detailing. When the material is like drab con¬
crete, these directors become great on-the-spot inventors, using their curiously
niggling, reaming style for adding background detail (Walsh); suave grace
(Hawks); crawling, mechanized tension (Mann); veiled gravity (Wellman);
svelte semicaricature (John Farrow); modern Gothic vehemence (Phil Karlson);
and dark, modish vaudeville (Robert Aldrich).
Manny F a rbe r
4 i 7
In the films of these hard-edged directors can be found the unheralded rip¬
ple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly life-worn detail which the visitor
to a strange city finds springing out at every step. The Hawks film is as good on
the mellifluous grace of the impudent American hard rock as can be found in
any art work; the Mann films use American objects and terrain—guns, cliffs,
boulders, an 1865 locomotive, telephone wires—with more cruel intimacy
than any other film-maker; the Wellman film is the only clear shot at the mean,
brassy, clawlike soul of the lone American wolf that has been taken in films. In
other words, these actioneers—Mann and Hawks and Keighley and, in recent
times, Aldrich and Karlson—go completely underground before proving them¬
selves more honest and subtle than the water buffaloes of film art: George
Stevens, Billy Wilder, Vittorio De Sica, Georges Clouzot. (Clouzot’s most suc¬
cessful work, Wages of Fear, is a wholesale steal of the mean physicality and acrid
highway inventions in such Walsh-Wellman films as They Drive by Night. Also,
the latter film is a more flexible, adroitly ad-libbed, worked-in creation than
Clouzot’s eclectic money-maker.)
Unfortunately, the action directors suffer from presentation problems. Their
work is now seen repeatedly on the blurred, chopped, worn, darkened,
commercial-ridden movie programs on TV. Even in the impossible conditions
of the “Late Show,” where the lighting is four shades too dark and the porthole¬
shaped screen defeats the movie’s action, the deep skill of Hawks and his tribe
shows itself. Time has dated and thinned out the story excitement, but the abil¬
ity to capture the exact homely-manly character of forgotten locales and mis¬
anthropic figures is still in the pictures along with pictorial compositions (Ford’s
Last of the Mohicans ) that occasionally seem as lovely as anything that came out
ofthe camera box of Billy Bitzer and Matthew Brady. The conditions in the out¬
cast theaters—the Lyric on Times Square, the Liberty on Market Street, the Vic¬
tory on Chestnut—are not as bad as TV, but bad enough. The screen image is
often out of plumb, the house lights are half left on during the picture, the bro¬
ken seats are only a minor annoyance in the unpredictable terrain. Yet, these
action-film homes are the places to study Hawks, Wellman, Mann, as well as
their near and distant cousins.
The underground directors have been saving the American male on the screen
for three decades without receiving the slightest credit from critics and prize
committees. The hard, exact defining of male action, completely lacking in act¬
ing fat, is a common item only in underground films. The cream on the top of a
Framed or Appointment with Danger (directed by two first cousins of the Hawks-
Walsh strain) is the eye-flicking action that shows the American body—arms,
elbows, legs, mouths, the tension profile line—being used expediently, with
grace and the suggestion of jolting hardness. Otherwise, the Hollywood talkie
seems to have been invented to give an embarrassingly phony impression of the
virile action man. The performance is always fattened either by coyness (early
Genre
41 8
Robert Taylor), unction (Anthony Quinn), histrionic conceit (Gene Kelly), lib¬
eral knowingness (Brando), angelic stylishness (Mel Ferrer), oily hamming (Jose
Ferrer), Mother’s Boy passivity (Rock Fludson), or languor (Montgomery Clift).
Unless the actor lands in the hands of an underground director, he causes a candy-
coated effect that is misery for any spectator who likes a bit of male truth in films.
After a steady diet of undergrounders, the spectator realizes that these are
the only films that show the tension of an individual intelligence posing itself
against the possibilities of monotony, bathos, or sheer cliche. Though the action
film is filled with heroism or its absence, the real hero is the small detail which
has arisen from a stormy competition between lively color and credibility. The
hardness of these films arises from the esthetic give-and-go with banality. Thus,
the philosophical idea in underground films seems to be that nothing is easy in
life or the making of films. Jobs are difficult, even the act of watching a hum¬
drum bookstore scene from across the street has to be done with care and mod¬
esty to evade the type of butter-slicing glibness that rots the Zinnemann films.
In the Walsh film, a gangster walks through a saloon with so much tight-roped
ad-libbing and muscularity that he seems to be walking backward through the
situation. Hawks’s achievement of moderate toughness in Red River, using Clift’s
delicate languor and Wayne’s claylike acting, is remarkable. As usual, he steers
Clift through a series of cornball fetishes (like the Barney Google Ozark hat and
the trick handling of same) and graceful, semicollegiate business: stances and
kneelings and snake-quick gunmanship. The beauty of the job is the way the cliche
business is kneaded, strained against without breaking the naturalistic surface.
One feels that this is the first and last hard, clamped-down, imaginative job Clift
does in Hollywood—his one nonmush performance. Afterward, he goes to
work for Zinnemann, Stevens, Hitchcock.
The small buried attempt to pierce the banal pulp of underground stories with
fanciful grace notes is one of the important feats of the underground director.
Usually, the piercing consists in renovating a cheap rusty trick that has been slum¬
bering in the “thriller” director’s handbook—pushing a “color” effect against the
most resistant type of unshowy, hard-bitten direction. A mean butterball flicks
a gunman’s ear with a cigarette lighter. A night-frozen cowboy shudders over a
swig of whisky. A gorilla gang leader makes a cannonaded exit from a barber
chair. All these bits of congestion are like the lines of a hand to a good gun movie;
they are the tracings of difficulty that make the films seem uniquely hard and
formful. In each case, the director is taking a great chance with cliches and forc¬
ing them into a hard natural shape.
People don’t notice the absence of this hard combat with low, commonplace
ideas in the Zinnemann and Huston epics, wherein the action is a game in which
the stars take part with confidence and glee as though nothing can stop them.
They roll in parts of drug addicts, tortured sheriffs; success depending on how
Manny F a r be r
419
much sentimental bloop and artistic japery can be packed in without encoun¬
tering the demands of a natural act or character. Looking back on a Sinatra film,
one has the feeling of a private whirligig performance in the center of a frame
rather than a picture. On the other hand, a Cagney performance under the hands
of a Keighley is ingrained in a tight, malignant story. One remembers it as a
sinewy, life-marred exactness that is as quietly laid down as the smaller jobs
played by the Barton MacLanes and Frankie Darros.
A constant attendance at the Lyric-Pix-Victory theaters soon impresses the
spectator with the coverage of locales in action films. The average gun film trav¬
els like a shamus who knows his city and likes his private knowledges. Instead
of the picture-postcard sights, the underground film finds the most idiosyncratic
spot of a city and then locates the niceties within the large nicety. The Califor¬
nia Street hill in San Francisco ( Woman in Hiding) with its old-style mansions
played in perfect night photography against a deadened domestic bitching. A
YMCA scene that emphasizes the wonderful fat-waisted, middle-aged physical-
ity of people putting on tennis shoes and playing handball ( Appointment with Dan¬
ger). The terrorizing of a dowdy middle-aged, frog-faced woman (Born to Kill)
that starts in a decrepit hotel and ends in a bumbling, screeching, crawling mur¬
der at midnight on the shore. For his big shock effect, director Robert Wise (a
sometime member of the underground) uses the angle going down to the water
to create a middle-class mediocrity that out-horrors anything Graham Greene
attempted in his early books on small-time gunsels.
Another fine thing about the coverage is its topographic grimness, the fact
that the terrain looks worked over. From Walsh’s What Price Glory? to Mann’s
Men in War, the terrain is special in that it is used, kicked, grappled, worried,
sweated up, burrowed into, stomped on. The land is marched across in dark,
threading lines at twilight, or the effect is reversed with foot soldiers in white
parkas ( Fixed Bayonets) curving along a snowed-in battleground as they watch
troops moving back—in either case, the cliche effect is worked credibly inward
until it creates a haunting note like the army diagonals in Birth of a Nation. Rooms
are boxed, crossed, opened up as they are in few other films. The spectator gets
to know these rooms as well as his own hand. Years after seeing the film, he re¬
members the way a dulled waitress sat on the edge of a hotel bed, the weird elon¬
gated adobe in which ranch hands congregate before a Chisholm Trail drive. The
rooms in big-shot directors’ films look curiously bulbous, as though inflated with
hot air and turned toward the audience, like the high school operetta of the
1920’s.
Of all these poet-builders, Wellman is the most interesting, particularly with
Hopper-type scenery. It is a matter of drawing store fronts, heavy bedroom
boudoirs, the heisting of a lonely service station, with light, furious strokes. Also,
in mixing jolting vulgarity (Mae Clarke’s face being smashed with a grapefruit)
420
Genre
with a space composition dance in which the scene seems to be constructed be¬
fore your eyes. It may be a minor achievement, but, when Wellman finishes with
a service station or the wooden stairs in front of an ancient saloon, there is no
reason for any movie realist to handle the subject again. The scene is kept light,
textural, and as though it is being built from the outside in. There is no senti¬
ment of the type that spreads lugubrious shadows (Kazan), builds tensions of per¬
spective (Huston), or inflates with golden sunlight and finicky hot air (Stevens).
Easily the best part of underground films are the excavations of exciting-
familiar scenery. The opening up of a scene is more concerted in these films than
in other Hollywood efforts, but the most important thing is that the opening is
done by road-mapped strategies that play movement against space in a cunning
way, building the environment and event before your eyes. In every underground
film, these vigorous ramifications within a sharply seen terrain are the big at¬
traction, the main tent. No one does this anatomization of action and scene bet¬
ter than Hawks, who probably invented it—at least, the smooth version—in
such 1930’s gunblasts as The Crowd Roars. The control of Hawks’s strategies is
so ingenious that, when a person kneels or walks down the hallway, the move¬
ment seems to click into a predetermined slot. It is an uncanny accomplishment
that carries the spectator across the very ground of a giant ranch, into rooms
and out again, over to the wall to look at some faded fight pictures on a hotel
wall—as though he were in the grip of a spectacular, mobile “eye.” When
Hawks landscapes action—the cutting between light tower and storm-caught
plane in Ceiling Zero, the vegetalizing in The Thing, the shamus sweating in a green¬
house in The Big Sleep —the feeling is of a clever human tunneling just under the
surface of terrain. It is as though the film has a life of its own that goes on be¬
neath the story action.
However, there have been many great examples of such veining by human
interactions over a wide plane. One of the special shockers, in Each Dawn 1 Die,
has to do with the scissoring of a stooly during the movie shown at the peni¬
tentiary. This Keighley-Cagney effort is a wonder of excitement as it moves in
great leaps from screen to the rear of a crowded auditorium: crossing contrasts
of movement in three points of the hall, all of it done in a sinking gloom. One
of the more ironic crisscrossings has to do with the coughings of the stuck vic¬
tim played against the screen image of zooming airplanes over the Pacific.
In the great virtuoso films, there is something vaguely resembling this un¬
derground maneuvering, only it goes on above the story. Egocentric padding
that builds a great bonfire of pyrotechnics over a gapingly empty film. The per¬
fect example is a pumped-up fist fight that almost closes the three-hour Giant
film. This ballroom shuffle between a reforming rancher and a Mexican-hating
luncheonette owner is an entertaining creation in spectacular tumbling, swing¬
ing, back arching, bending. However, the endless masturbatory “building” of ex-
Man ny F arbe r
42 1
citement—beautiful haymakers, room-covering falls, thunderous sounds—is
more than slightly silly. Even if the room were valid, which it isn’t (a studio-
built chromium horror plopped too close to the edge of a lonely highway), the
room goes unexplored because of the jumbled timing. The excess that is so no¬
ticeable in Stevens’s brawl is absent in the least serious undergrounder, which
attains most of its crisp, angular character from the modesty of a director work¬
ing skillfully far within the earthworks of the story.
Underground films have almost ceased to be a part of the movie scene. The
founders of the action film have gone into awkward, big-scaled productions in¬
volving pyramid-building, a passenger plane in trouble over the Pacific, and post¬
card Westerns with Jimmy Stewart and his harassed Adam’s apple approach to
gutty acting. The last drainings of the underground film show a tendency toward
moving from the plain guttural approach of Steel Helmet to a Germanically
splashed type of film. Of these newcomers, Robert Aldrich is certainly the most
exciting—a lurid, psychiatric stormer who gets an overflow of vitality and sheer
love for movie-making into the film. This enthusiasm is the rarest item in a dried,
decayed-lemon type of movie period. Aldrich makes viciously anti-Something
movies— Attack stomps on Southern rascalism and the officer sect in war, The
Big Knife impales the Zanuck-Goldwyn big shot in Hollywood. The Aldrich
films are filled with exciting characterizations—by Lee Marvin, Rod Steiger, Jack
Palance—of highly psyched-up, marred, and bothered men. Phil Karlson has
done some surprising modern Gothic treatments of the Brinks hold-up ( Kansas
City Confidential) and the vice-ridden Southern town ( The Phenix City Story). His
movies are remarkable for their endless outlay of scary cheapness in detailing
the modem underworld. Also, Karlson’s work has a chilling documentary ex¬
actness and an exciting shot-scattering belligerence.
There is no longer a literate audience for the masculine picture-making that
Hawks and Wellman exploited, as there was in the 1930’s. In those exciting
movie years, a smart audience waited around each week for the next Hawks,
Preston Sturges, or Ford film—shoe-stringers that were far to the side of the
expensive Hollywood film. That underground audience, with its expert voice
in Otis Ferguson and its ability to choose between perceptive trash and the Thal-
berg pepsin-flavored sloshing with Tracy and Gable, has now oozed away. It
seems ridiculous, but the Fergusonite went into fast decline during the mid-
1940’s when the movie market was flooded with fake underground films—
plushy thrillers with neo-Chandler scripts and a romantic style that seemed to
pour the gore, histrionics, decor out of a giant catsup bottle. The nadir of these
films: an item called Singapore with Fred MacMurray and Ava Gardner.
The straw that finally breaks the back of the underground film tradition is the
dilettante behavior of intellectuals on the subject of oaters. Esthetes and upper
bohemians now favor horse operas almost as wildly as they like the cute, little-
422 Genre
guy worshipings of De Sica and the pedantic, interpretive reading of Alec Guin¬
ness. This fad for Western films shows itself in the inevitable little-magazine
review, which finds an affinity between the subject matter of cowboy films and
the inner esthetics of Cinemah. The Hawks-Wellman tradition, which is basi¬
cally a subterranean delight that looks like a cheap penny candy on the outside,
hasn’t a chance of reviving when intellectuals enthuse in equal amounts over
Westerns by Ford, Nunnally Johnson, J. Sturges, Stevens, Delmer Daves. In Fer¬
guson’s day, the intellectual could differentiate between a stolid genre painter
(Ford), a long-winded cuteness expert with a rotogravure movie scene (John¬
son), a scene-painter with a notions-counter eye and a primly naive manner with
sun-hardened bruisers (John Sturges), and a Boys’ Life nature lover who intelli¬
gently half-prettifies adolescents and backwoods primitives (Daves). Today, the
audience for Westerns and gangster careers is a sickeningly frivolous one that
does little more than play the garbage collector or make a night court of films.
With this high-brow audience that loves banality and pomp more than the
tourists at Radio City Music Hall, there is little reason to expect any stray di¬
rector to try for a hidden meager-looking work that is directly against the seri¬
ous art grain.
Susan Sontac
This essay is doublyfascinating, firstfor what Sontag has to say about the science fiction
film and second for how she phrases it, as if she too were somehow a visitor from another
world, encountering an alien phenomenon. It is impossible, when one reads these words,
to imagine her ever huddled in the dark of a movie theater, eating popcorn, and jumping
with fright when the bug-eyed monster appears. There is not a single sentence that sug¬
gests she has ever enjoyed one of the films she is discussing, yet one suspects she would not
have attended so many of them, and paid such close attention, if all she had hoped to get
out of them was an essay.
Susan Sontag
4 2 3
“The Imagination of Disaster”
The typical science fiction film has a form as predictable as a Western, and is
made up of elements which, to a practiced eye, are as classic as the saloon brawl,
the blonde schoolteacher from the East, and the gun duel on the deserted main
street.
One model scenario proceeds through five phases.
(1) The arrival of the thing. (Emergence of the monsters, landing of the alien
spaceship, etc.) This is usually witnessed or suspected by just one person, a young
scientist on a field trip. Nobody, neither his neighbors nor his colleagues, will
believe him for some time. The hero is not married, but has a sympathetic
though also incredulous girl friend.
(2) Confirmation of the hero’s report by a host of witnesses to a great act of
destruction. (If the invaders are beings from another planet, a fruitless attempt
to parley with them and get them to leave peacefully.) The local police are sum¬
moned to deal with the situation and massacred.
(3) In the capital of the country, conferences between scientists and the mil¬
itary take place, with the hero lecturing before a chart, map, or blackboard. A
national emergency is declared. Reports of further destruction. Authorities
from other countries arrive in black limousines. All international tensions are
suspended in view of the planetary emergency. This stage of ten includes a rapid
montage of news broadcasts in various languages, a meeting at the UN, and more
conferences between the military and the scientists. Plans are made for de¬
stroying the enemy.
(4) Further atrocities. At some point the hero’s girl friend is in grave dan¬
ger. Massive counter-attacks by international forces, with brilliant displays of
rocketry, rays, and other advanced weapons, are all unsuccessful. Enormous mil¬
itary casualties, usually by incineration. Cities are destroyed and/or evacuated.
There is an obligatory scene here of panicked crowds stampeding along a high¬
way or a big bridge, being waved on by numerous policemen who, if the film is
Japanese, are immaculately white-gloved, preternaturally calm, and call out in
dubbed English, “Keep moving. There is no need to be alarmed.”
(j) More conferences, whose motif is: “They must be vulnerable to some¬
thing.” Throughout the hero has been working in his lab to this end. The final
strategy, upon which all hopes depend, is drawn up; the ultimate weapon-—often
a super-powerful, as yet untested, nuclear device—is mounted. Countdown.
Final repulse of the monster or invaders. Mutual congratulations, while the hero
and girl friend embrace cheek to cheek and scan the skies sturdily. “But have we
seen the last of them?”
4U
Genre
The film I have just described should be in color and on a wide screen. Another
typical scenario, which follows, is simpler and suited to black-and-white films
with a lower budget. It has four phases.
(1) The hero (usually, but not always, a scientist) and his girl friend, or his
wife and two children, are disporting themselves in some innocent ultra-normal
middle-class surroundings—their house in a small town, or on vacation (camp¬
ing, boating). Suddenly, someone starts behaving strangely; or some innocent
form of vegetation becomes monstrously enlarged and ambulatory. If a charac¬
ter is pictured driving an automobile, something gruesome looms up in the mid¬
dle of the road. If it is night, strange lights hurtle across the sky.
(2) After following the thing’s tracks, or determining that It is radioactive,
or poking around a huge crater—in short, conducting some sort of crude in¬
vestigation—the hero tries to warn the local authorities, without effect; nobody
believes anything is amiss. The hero knows better. If the thing is tangible, the
house is elaborately barricaded. If the invading alien is an invisible parasite, a
doctor or friend is called in, who is himself rather quickly killed or “taken pos¬
session of” by the thing.
(3) The advice of whoever further is consulted proves useless. Meanwhile,
It continues to claim other victims in the town, which remains implausibly iso¬
lated from the rest of the world. General helplessness.
(4) One of two possibilities. Either the hero prepares to do battle alone, ac¬
cidentally discovers the thing’s one vulnerable point, and destroys it. Or, he
somehow manages to get out of town and succeeds in laying his case before com¬
petent authorities. They, along the lines of the first script but abridged, deploy
a complex technology which (after initial setbacks) finally prevails against the
invaders.
Another version of the second script opens with the scientist-hero in his labo¬
ratory, which is located in the basement or on the grounds of his tasteful,
prosperous house. Through his experiments, he unwittingly causes a frightful
metamorphosis in some class of plants or animals which turn carnivorous and
go on a rampage. Or else, his experiments have caused him to be injured (some¬
times irrevocably) or “invaded” himself. Perhaps he has been experimenting with
radiation, or has built a machine to communicate with beings from other plan¬
ets or transport him to other places or times.
Another version of the first script involves the discovery of some fundamen¬
tal alteration in the conditions of existence of our planet, brought about by
nuclear testing, which will lead to the extinction in a few months of all human
life. For example: the temperature of the earth is becoming too high or too low
Susan Sontag
42 <T
to support life, or the earth is cracking in two, or it is gradually being blanketed
by lethal fallout.
A third script, somewhat but not altogether different from the first two, con¬
cerns a journey through space—to the moon, or some other planet. What the
space-voyagers discover commonly is that the alien terrain is in a state of dire
emergency, itself threatened by extra-planetary invaders or nearing extinction
through the practice of nuclear warfare. The terminal dramas of the first and
second scripts are played out there, to which is added the problem of getting
away from the doomed and/ or hostile planet and back to Earth.
I am aware, of course, that there are thousands of science fiction novels (their
heyday was the late 1940s), not to mention the transcriptions of science fiction
themes which, more and more, provide the principal subject-matter of comic
books. But I propose to discuss science fiction films (the present period began
in 19f o and continues, considerably abated, to this day) as an independent sub¬
genre, without reference to other media—and, most particularly, without ref¬
erence to the novels from which, in many cases, they were adapted. For, while
novel and film may share the same plot, the fundamental difference between the
resources of the novel and the film makes them quite dissimilar.
Certainly, compared with the science fiction novels, their film counterparts
have unique strengths, one of which is the immediate representation of the
extraordinary: physical deformity and mutation, missile and rocket combat, top¬
pling skyscrapers. The movies are, naturally, weak just where the science fic-
tionnovels(some of them) are strong—on science. Butin place of an intellectual
workout, they can supply something the novels can never provide—sensuous
elaboration. In the films it is by means of images and sounds, not words that have
to be translated by the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy of liv¬
ing through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of
humanity itself.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is
one of the oldest subjects of art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed
intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quantity and ingenuity. If you
will, it is a question of scale. But the scale, particularly in the wide-screen color
films (of which the ones by the Japanese director Inoshiro Honda and the Amer¬
ican director George Pal are technically the most convincing and visually the most
exciting), does raise the matter to another level.
Thus, the science fiction film (like that of a very different contemporary genre,
the Happening) is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the pecu¬
liar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess. And it is in the im¬
agery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. Hence, the
disadvantage of the cheap film—in which the monster appears or the rocket lands
426
Genre
in a small dull-looking town. (Hollywood budget needs usually dictate that the
town be in the Arizona or California desert. In T he Thing from Another World [1951]
the rather sleazy and confined set is supposed to be an encampment near the
North Pole.) Still, good black-and-white science fiction films have been made.
But a bigger budget, which usually means color, allows a much greater play back
and forth among several model environments. There is the populous city. There
is the lavish but ascetic interior of the spaceship—either the invaders’ or ours—
replete with streamlined chromium fixtures and dials and machines whose com¬
plexity is indicated by the number of colored lights they flash and strange noises
they emit. There is the laboratory crowded with formidable boxes and scien¬
tific apparatus. There is a comparatively old-fashioned-looking conference room,
where the scientists unfurl charts to explain the desperate state of things to the
military. And each of these standard locales or backgrounds is subject to two
modalities—intact and destroyed. We may, if we are lucky, be treated to a
panorama of melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and
fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft, colorful deadly rays; and to a sym¬
phony of screams, weird electronic signals, the noisiest military hardware going,
and the leaden tones of the laconic denizens of alien planets and their subjugated
earthlings.
Certain of the primitive gratifications of science fiction films—for instance,
the depiction of urban disaster on a colossally magnified scale—are shared with
other types of films. Visually there is little difference between mass havoc as rep¬
resented in the old horror and monster films and what we find in science fiction
films, except (again) scale. In the old monster films, the monster always headed
for the great city, where he had to do a fair bit of rampaging, hurling busses off
bridges, crumpling trains in his bare hands, toppling buildings, and so forth. The
archetype is King Kong, in Schoedsack and Cooper’s great film of 1933, run¬
ning amok, first in the native village (trampling babies, a bit of footage excised
from most prints), then in New York. This is really no different in spirit from
the scene in Inoshiro Honda’s Kodan (1937) in which two giant reptiles—with
a wingspan of £ o o feet and supersonic speeds—by flapping their wings whip up
a cyclone that blows most of Tokyo to smithereens. Or the destruction of half
of Japan by the gigantic robot with the great incinerating ray that shoots forth
from his eyes, at the beginning of Honda’s The M/sterians (1939). Or, the dev¬
astation by the rays from a fleet of flying saucers of New Y ork, Paris, and T okyo,
in Battle in Outer Space (i960). Or, the inundation of New York in When Worlds
Collide (1951). Or, the end of London in 1966 depicted in George Pal’s The Time
Machine (i960). Neither do these sequences differ in aesthetic intention from
the destruction scenes in the big sword, sandal, and orgy color spectaculars set
in Biblical and Roman times—the end of Sodom in Aldrich’s Sodom and Gomor¬
rah, of Gaza in De Mille’s Samson and Delilah, of Rhodes in The Colossus of Rhodes,
and of Rome in a dozen Nero movies. Griffith began it with the Babylon sequence
Susan Sontag
427
in Intolerance, and to this day there is nothing like the thrill of watching all those
expensive sets come tumbling down.
In other respects as well, the science fiction films of the 1950s take up fa¬
miliar themes. The famous 1930s movie serials and comics of the adventures of
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, as well as the more recent spate of comic book
super-heroes with extraterrestrial origins (the most famous is Superman, a
foundling from the planet Krypton, currently described as having been ex¬
ploded by a nuclear blast), share motifs with more recent science fiction movies.
But there is an important difference. The old science fiction films, and most of
the comics, still have an essentially innocent relation to disaster. Mainly they
offer new versions of the oldest romance of all—of the strong invulnerable hero
with a mysterious lineage come to do battle on behalf of good and against evil.
Recent science fiction films have a decided grimness, bolstered by their much
greater degree of visual credibility, which contrasts strongly with the older
films. Modern historical reality has greatly enlarged the imagination of disaster,
and the protagonists—perhaps by the very nature of what is visited upon them—
no longer seem wholly innocent.
The lure of such generalized disaster as a fantasy is that it releases one from
normal obligations. The trump card of the end-of-the-world movies—like The
Day the Earth Caught Fire (1 96 2)—is that great scene with New York or London
or Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated. Or, as in The
World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1957), the whole movie can be devoted to the fan¬
tasy of occupying the deserted metropolis and starting all over again, a world
Robinson Crusoe.
Another kind of satisfaction these films supply is extreme moral simplifica¬
tion—that is to say, a morally acceptable fantasy where one can give outlet to
cruel or at least amoral feelings. In this respect, science fiction films partly over¬
lap with horror films. This is the undeniable pleasure we derive from looking
at freaks, beings excluded from the category of the human. The sense of supe¬
riority over the freak conjoined in varying proportions with the titillation of fear
and aversion makes it possible for moral scruples to be lifted, for cruelty to be
enjoyed. The same thing happens in science fiction films. In the figure of the mon¬
ster from outer space, the freakish, the ugly, and the predatory all converge—
and provide a fantasy target for righteous bellicosity to discharge itself, and for
the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering and disaster. Science fiction films are one
of the purest forms of spectacle; that is, we are rarely inside anyone’s feelings.
(An exception is Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man [1957].) We are
merely spectators; we watch.
But in science fiction films, unlike horror films, there is not much horror.
Suspense, shocks, surprises are mostly abjured in favor of a steady, inexorable
plot. Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction
and violence—a technological view. Things, objects, machinery play a major role
42 8
Genre
in these films. A greater range of ethical values is embodied in the decor of these
films than in the people. Things, rather than the helpless humans, are the locus
of values because we experience them, rather than people, as the sources of
power. According to science fiction films, man is naked without his artifacts.
They stand for different values, they are potent, they are what get destroyed,
and they are the indispensable tools for the repulse of the alien invaders or the
repair of the damaged environment.
The science fiction films are strongly moralistic. The standard message is the one
about the proper, or humane, use of science, versus the mad, obsessional use of
science. This message the science fiction films share in common with the clas¬
sic horror films of the 1930s, like Frankenstein, The Mummy, Island ojLost Souls,
Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (George Franju’s brilliant Les Yeuxsans Visage [ 1959], called
here The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus, is a more recent example.) In the hor¬
ror films, we have the mad or obsessed or misguided scientist who pursues his
experiments against good advice to the contrary, creates a monster or monsters,
and is himself destroyed—often recognizing his folly himself, and dying in the
successful effort to destroy his own creation. One science fiction equivalent of
this is the scientist, usually a member of a team, who defects to the planetary
invaders because “their” science is more advanced than “ours.”
This is the case in The Mysterians, and, true to form, the renegade sees his error
in the end, and from within the Mysterian space ship destroys it and himself. In
This Island Earth (19 55), the inhabitants of the beleaguered planet Metaluna pro¬
pose to conquer earth, but their project is foiled by a Metalunan scientist named
Exeter who, having lived on earth a while and learned to love Mozart, cannot
abide such viciousness. Exeter plunges his spaceship into the ocean after returning
a glamorous pair (male and female) of American physicists to earth. Metaluna
dies. In The Fly (1958), the hero, engrossed in his basement-laboratory experi¬
ments on a matter-transmitting machine, uses himself as a subject, exchanges
head and one arm with a housefly which had accidentally gotten into the ma¬
chine, becomes a monster, and with his last shred of human will destroys his
laboratory and orders his wife to kill him. His discovery, for the good of
mankind, is lost.
Being a clearly labeled species of intellectual, scientists in science fiction
films are always liable to crack up or go off the deep end. In Conquest of Space
( 1 9£ 5), the scientist-commander of an international expedition to Mars suddenly
acquires scruples about the blasphemy involved in the undertaking, and begins
reading the Bible mid-journey instead of attending to his duties. The comman¬
der’s son, who is his junior officer and always addresses his father as “General,”
is forced to kill the old man when he tries to prevent the ship from landing on
Susan Sontag
429
Mars. In this film, both sides of the ambivalence toward scientists are given voice.
Generally, for a scientific enterprise to be treated entirely sympathetically in
these films, it needs the certificate of utility. Science, viewed without ambiva¬
lence, means an efficacious response to danger. Disinterested intellectual cu¬
riosity rarely appears in any form other than caricature, as a maniacal dementia
that cuts one off from normal human relations. But this suspicion is usually di¬
rected at the scientist rather than his work. The creative scientist may become
a martyr to his own discovery, through an accident or by pushing things too far.
But the implication remains that other men, less imaginative—in short, techni¬
cians—could have administered the same discovery better and more safely. The
most ingrained contemporary mistrust of the intellect is visited, in these movies,
upon the scientist-as-intellectual.
The message that the scientist is one who releases forces which, if not con¬
trolled for good, could destroy man himself seems innocuous enough. One of
the oldest images of the scientist is Shakespeare’s Prospero, the overdetached
scholar forcibly retired from society to a desert island, only partly in control of
the magic forces in which he dabbles. Equally classic is the figure of the scien¬
tist as satanist (Doctor Faustus, and stories of Poe and Hawthorne). Science is
magic, and man has always known that there is black magic as well as white. But
it is not enough to remark that contemporary attitudes—as reflected in science
fiction films—remain ambivalent, that the scientist is treated as both satanist and
savior. The proportions have changed, because of the new context in which the
old admiration and fear of the scientist are located. For his sphere of influence
is no longer local, himself or his immediate community. It is planetary, cosmic.
One gets the feeling, particularly in the Japanese films but not only there, that
a mass trauma exists over the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of fu¬
ture nuclear wars. Most of the science fiction films bear witness to this trauma,
and, in a way, attempt to exorcise it.
The accidental awakening of the super-destructive monster who has slept in
the earth since prehistory is, often, an obvious metaphor for the Bomb. But there
are many explicit references as well. In The Mysterious, a probe ship from the
planet Mysteroid has landed on earth, near Tokyo. Nuclear warfare having been
practiced on Mysteroid for centuries (their civilization is “more advanced than
ours”), ninety percent of those now bom on the planet have to be destroyed at
birth, because of defects caused by the huge amounts of Strontium 90 in their
diet. The Mysterians have come to earth to marry earth women, and possibly
to take over our relatively uncontaminated planet. ... In The Incredible Shrink¬
ing Man, the John Doe hero is the victim of a gust of radiation which blows over
the water, while he is out boating with his wife; the radiation causes him to grow
430
Genre
smaller and smaller, until at the end of the movie he steps through the fine mesh
of a window screen to become “the infinitely small.” ... In Rodan, a horde of
monstrous carnivorous prehistoric insects, and finally a pair of giant flying rep¬
tiles (the prehistoric Archeopteryx), are hatched from dormant eggs in the
depths of a mine shaft by the impact of nuclear test explosions, and go on to
destroy a good part of the world before they are felled by the molten lava of a
volcanic eruption. ... In the English film, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, two si¬
multaneous hydrogen bomb tests by the United States and Russia change by 11
degrees the tilt of the earth on its axis and alter the earth’s orbit so that it be¬
gins to approach the sun.
Radiation casualties—ultimately, the conception of the whole world as a ca¬
sualty of nuclear testing and nuclear warfare—is the most ominous of all the no¬
tions with which science fiction films deal. Universes become expendable.
Worlds become contaminated, burnt out, exhausted, obsolete. In Rocketship X-
M (1950) explorers from the earth land on Mars, where they learn that atomic
warfare has destroyed Martian civilization. In George Pal’s The War of the Worlds
(19 J3), reddish spindly alligator-skinned creatures from Mars invade the earth
because their planet is becoming too cold to be inhabitable. In This Island Earth,
also American, the planet Metaluna, whose population has long ago been dri¬
ven underground by warfare, is dying under the missile attacks of an enemy
planet. Stocks of uranium, which power the force field shielding Metaluna,
have been used up; and an unsuccessful expedition is sent to earth to enlist earth
scientists to devise new sources for nuclear power. In Joseph Losey’s The Damned
(196 1), nine icy-cold radioactive children are being reared by a fanatical scien¬
tist in a dark cave on the English coast to be the only survivors of the inevitable
nuclear Armageddon.
There is a vast amount of wishful thinking in science fiction films, some of it
touching, some of it depressing. Again and again, one detects the hunger for a
“good war,” which poses no moral problems, admits of no moral qualifications.
The imagery of science fiction films will satisfy the most bellicose addict of war
films, for a lot of the satisfactions of war films pass, untransformed, into science
fiction films. Examples: the dogfights between earth “fighter rockets” and alien
spacecraft in the Battle in Outer Space (i960); the escalating firepower in the suc¬
cessive assaults upon the invaders in The Mysterious, which Dan Talbot correctly
described as a non-stop holocaust; the spectacular bombardment of the under¬
ground fortress of Metaluna in This Island Earth.
Yetatthesametimethe bellicosity of science fiction films is neatly channeled
into the yearning for peace, or for at least peaceful coexistence. Some scientist
generally takes sententious note of the fact that it took the planetary invasion to
make the warring nations of the earth come to their senses and suspend their
Susan Sontag
43
own conflicts. One of the main themes of many science fiction films—the color
ones usually, because they have the budget and resources to develop the mili¬
tary spectacle—is this UN fantasy, a fantasy of united warfare. (The same wish¬
ful UN theme cropped up in a recent spectacular which is not science fiction,
Fifty-Five Days in Peking [1963]. There, topically enough, the Chinese, the Box¬
ers, play the role of Martian invaders who unite the earthmen, in this case the
United States, England, Russia, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan.) A great
enough disaster cancels all enmities and calls upon the utmost concentration of
earth resources.
Science—technology—is conceived of as the great unifier. Thus the science
fiction films also project a Utopian fantasy. In the classic models of Utopian think¬
ing—Plato’s Republic, Campanella’s City of the Sun, More’s Utopia, Swift’s
land of the Houyhnhnms, Voltaire’s Eldorado—society had worked out a per¬
fect consensus. In these societies reasonableness had achieved an unbreakable
supremacy over the emotions. Since no disagreement or social conflict was in¬
tellectually plausible, none was possible. As in Melville’s Typee, “they all think
the same.” The universal rule of reason meant universal agreement. It is inter¬
esting, too, that societies in which reason was pictured as totally ascendant were
also traditionally pictured as having an ascetic or materially frugal and econom¬
ically simple mode of life. But in the Utopian world community projected by
science fiction films, totally pacified and ruled by scientific consensus, the de¬
mand for simplicity of material existence would be absurd.
Yet alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity
embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contem¬
porary existence. I don’t mean only the very real trauma of the Bomb—that it
has been used, that there are enough now to kill everyone on earth many times
over, that those new bombs may very well be used. Besides these new anxieties
about physical disaster, the prospect of universal mutilation and even annihila¬
tion, the science fiction films reflect powerful anxieties about the condition of
the individual psyche.
For science fiction films may also be described as a popular mythology for
the contemporary negative imagination about the impersonal. The other-world
creatures that seek to take “us” over are an “it,” not a “they.” The planetary in¬
vaders are usually zombielike. Their movements are either cool, mechanical, or
lumbering, blobby. But it amounts to the same thing. If they are non-human in
form, they proceed with an absolutely regular, unalterable movement (unal¬
terable save by destruction). If they are human in form—dressed in space suits,
etc.—then they obey the most rigid military discipline, and display no personal
characteristics whatsoever. And it is this regime of emotionlessness, of imper¬
sonality, of regimentation, which they will impose on the earth if they are sue-
432
Genre
cessful. “No more love, no more beauty, no more pain,” boasts a converted
earthling in T he Invasion ofthe Body Snatchers (1 9J 6). The half-earthling, half-alien
children in The Children of the Damned (1960) are absolutely emotionless, move
as a group and understand each others’ thoughts, and are all prodigious intel¬
lects. They are the wave of the future, man in his next stage of development.
These alien invaders practice a crime which is worse than murder. They do
not simply kill the person. They obliterate him. In The War of the Worlds, the ray
which issues from the rocket ship disintegrates all persons and objects in its path,
leaving no trace of them but alight ash. In Honda’s The H-Man (1959), the creep¬
ing blob melts all flesh with which it comes in contact. If the blob, which looks
like a huge hunk of red Jello and can crawl across floors and up and down walls,
so much as touches your bare foot, all that is left of you is a heap of clothes on
the floor. (A more articulated, size-multiplying blob is the villain in the English
film The Creeping Unknown [ 19j6].) In another version of this fantasy, the body
is preserved but the person is entirely reconstituted as the automatized servant
or agent of the alien powers. This is, of course, the vampire fantasy in new dress.
The person is really dead, but he doesn’t know it. He is “undead,” he has be¬
come an “unperson.” It happens to a whole California town in The Invasion of the
Body Snatchers, to several earth scientists in This Island Earth, and to assorted in¬
nocents in It Camefrom Outer Space, Attack ofthe Puppet People (1 9J 8), and The Brain
Eaters (1958). As the victim always backs away from the vampire’s horrifying
embrace, so in science fiction films the person always fights being “taken over”;
he wants to retain his humanity. But once the deed has been done, the victim is
eminently satisfied with his condition. He has not been converted from human
amiability to monstrous “animal” bloodlust (a metaphoric exaggeration of sex¬
ual desire), as in the old vampire fantasy. No, he has simply become far more
efficient—the very model of technocratic man, purged of emotions, volition¬
less, tranquil, obedient to all orders. (The dark secret behind human nature used
to be the upsurge of the animal—as in King Kong. The threat to man, his avail¬
ability to dehumanization, lay in his own animality. Now the danger is under¬
stood as residing in man’s ability to be turned into a machine.)
The rule, of course, is that this horrible and irremediable form of murder can
strike anyone in the film except the hero. The hero and his family, while greatly
threatened, always escape this fate and by the end of the film the invaders have
been repulsed or destroyed. I know of only one exception, The Day That Mars
Invaded Earth (1963), in which after all the standard struggles the scientist-hero,
his wife, and their two children are “taken over” by the alien invaders—and that’s
that. (The last minutes of the film show them being incinerated by the Martians’
rays and their ash silhouettes flushed down their empty swimming pool, while
their simulacra drive off in the family car.) Another variant but upbeat switch
on the rule occurs in The Creation of the Humanoids (1964), where the hero dis¬
covers at the end of the film that he, too, has been turned into a metal robot,
Susan Sontag
433
complete with highly efficient and virtually indestructible mechanical insides,
although he didn’t know it and detected no difference in himself. He learns, how¬
ever, that he will shortly be upgraded into a “humanoid” having all the proper¬
ties of a real man.
Of all the standard motifs of science fiction films, this theme of dehuman¬
ization is perhaps the most fascinating. For, as I have indicated, it is scarcely a
black-and-white situation, as in the old vampire films. The attitude of the sci¬
ence fiction films toward depersonalization is mixed. On the one hand, they de¬
plore it as the ultimate horror. On the other hand, certain characteristics of the
dehumanized invaders, modulated and disguised—such as the ascendancy of rea¬
son over feelings, the idealization of teamwork and the consensus-creating ac¬
tivities of science, a marked degree of moral simplification—are precisely traits
of the savior-scientist. It is interesting that when the scientist in these films is
treated negatively, it is usually done through the portrayal of an individual sci¬
entist who holes up in his laboratory and neglects his fiancee or his loving wife
and children, obsessed by his daring and dangerous experiments. The scientist
as a loyal member of a team, and therefore considerably less individualized, is
treated quite respectfully.
There is absolutely no social criticism, of even the most implicit kind, in sci¬
ence fiction films. No criticism, for example, of the conditions of our society
which create the impersonality and dehumanization which science fiction fan¬
tasies displace onto the influence of an alien It. Also, the notion of science as a
social activity, interlocking with social and political interests, is unacknowledged.
Science is simply either adventure (for good or evil) or a technical response to
danger. And, typically, when the fear of science is paramount—when science
is conceived of as black magic rather than white—the evil has no attribution be¬
yond that of the perverse will of an individual scientist. In science fiction films
the antithesis of black magic and white is drawn as a split between technology,
which is beneficent, and the errant individual will of a lone intellectual.
Thus, science fiction films can be looked at as thematically central allegory,
replete with standard modern attitudes. The theme of depersonalization (being
“taken over”) which I have been talking about is a new allegory reflecting the
age-old awareness of man that, sane, he is always perilously close to insanity and
unreason. But there is something more here than just a recent, popular image
which expresses man’s perennial, but largely unconscious, anxiety about his san¬
ity. The image derives most of its power from a supplementary and historical
anxiety, also not experienced consciously by most people, about the depersonal¬
izing conditions of modem urban life. Similarly, it is not enough to note that
science fiction allegories are one of the new myths about—that is, one of the
ways of accommodating to and negating—the perennial human anxiety about
death. (Myths of heaven and hell, and of ghosts, had the same function.) For,
again, there is a historically specifiable twist which intensifies the anxiety. I
434
Genre
mean, the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 2oth century when
it became clear that, from now on to the end of human history, every person
would spend his individual life under the threat not only of individual death,
which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically—col¬
lective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually with¬
out warning.
From a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not
greatly differ from one period in history to another. But from a political and
moral point of view, it does. The expectation of the apocalypse may be the oc¬
casion for a radical disaffiliation from society, as when thousands of Eastern Eu¬
ropean Jews in the 17th century, hearing that Sabbatai Zevi had been proclaimed
the Messiah and that the end of the world was imminent, gave up their homes
and businesses and began the trek to Palestine. But people take the news of their
doom in diverse ways. It is reported that in 1945 the populace of Berlin received
without great agitation the news that Hitler had decided to kill them all, before
the Allies arrived, because they had not been worthy enough to win the war.
We are, alas, more in the position of the Berliners of 1945 than of the Jews of
17th century Eastern Europe; and our response is closer to theirs, too. What I
am suggesting is that the imagery of disaster in science fiction is above all the
emblem of an inadequate response. I don’t mean to bear down on the films for
this. They themselves are only a sampling, stripped of sophistication, of the in¬
adequacy of most people’s response to the unassimilable terrors that infect their
consciousness. The interest of the films, aside from their considerable amount
of cinematic charm, consists in this intersection between a naive and largely de¬
based commercial art product and the most profound dilemmas of the contem¬
porary situation.
Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two
equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and in¬
conceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts,
which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that
fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from
terrors—real or anticipated—by an escape into exotic, dangerous situations
which have last-minute happy endings. But another of the things that fantasy can
do is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it.
In one case, fantasy beautifies the world. In the other, it neutralizes it.
The fantasy in science fiction films does both jobs. The films reflect world¬
wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They inculcate a strange apathy con¬
cerning the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction which I for
one find haunting and depressing. The naive level of the films neatly tempers
the sense of otherness, of alien-ness, with the grossly familiar. In particular, the
Libby Gel man-Waxner
43 S
dialogue of most science fiction films, which is of a monumental but often
touching banality, makes them wonderfully, unintentionally funny. Lines like
“Come quickly, there’s a monster in my bathtub,” “We must do something about
this,” “Wait, Professor. There’s someone on the telephone,” “But that’s in¬
credible,” and the old American stand-by, “I hope it works!” are hilarious in the
context of picturesque and deafening holocaust. Yet the films also contain some¬
thing that is painful and in deadly earnest.
There is a sense in which all these movies are in complicity with the abhor¬
rent. They neutralize it, as I have said. It is no more, perhaps, than the way all
art draws its audience into a circle of complicity with the thing represented. But
in these films we have to do with things which are (quite literally) unthinkable.
Here, “thinking about the unthinkable”—not in the way of Herman Kahn, as a
subject for calculation, but as a subject for fantasy—becomes, however inad¬
vertently, itself a somewhat questionable act from a moral point of view. The
films perpetuate cliches about identity, volition, power, knowledge, happiness,
social consensus, guilt, responsibility which are, to say the least, not serviceable
in our present extremity. But collective nightmares cannot be banished by
demonstrating that they are, intellectually and morally, fallacious. This night¬
mare—the one reflected, in various registers, in the science fiction films—is
too close to our reality.
Libby Gelman-Waxner.
Ms. Gelman- Warner writes a monthly column in Premiere magazine, and although she
has been unmasked as the pseudonym of Paul Rudnick, she is, like England’s Dame Edna
Everage, such a powerful creation that she sweeps her creator under his own rug. Libby
and Dame Edna have something else in common: They are not only very funny but pro¬
ceed from a nugget of truth. In a column on “Dream Dates,’’ Gelman-Waxner paused in
her praise of Dennis Quaid long enough to survey the competition: "Bruce Willis, like
Richard Gere, is his own Dream Date, and William Hun, who had DD potential, now
seems more like the weird, 40-year-old graduate student your aunt Rivka would fix you
up with.’’
436 Genre
“Libby ‘Noir’ ”
As a cultivated student of the filmic medium, I have often heard the expression
‘film noir”; after seeing several current examples of this genre, I now realize that
the exact translation of film noir is “sexy and really, really boring.” Films noirs ex¬
plore the dark underbelly of America, which certainly beats Colonial Williams¬
burg as a weekend getaway, and they always feature the same characters: a hot,
dangerous male drifter; a hot, dangerous, bored small-town slut; and at least
one disgusting fat man who gets brutally killed, right after which the drifter and
the slut have really great sex, usually near a ceiling fan and Venetian blinds. Every¬
body in film noir sweats a lot, and deodorant and Irish Spring are never
mentioned, so maybe film noir also means “unpleasant to stand behind at the
cash machine.”
The first film noir I saw this month was Wild at Heart, which was directed by
David Lynch, who also co-created the TV show Twin Peaks. I saw Wild at Heart
at a brand-new multiplex in S0H0, where there is a cafe that serves French pas¬
tries and at least ten different bottled waters, and where at least one of the the¬
aters is always showing a blasphemous foreign film that portrays Jesus as either
a cabdriver or a teenage girl. Everyone in the audience had asymmetrical hair¬
cuts, glasses with thick black frames, and clunky rubber-soled shoes. They
looked like French opium addicts, but if you ask me, they were all probably as¬
sistants at public-relations firms uptown. All of these people loved Wild at Heart,
and they all felt that David Lynch is a quirky visionary who deals in subconscious
dream imagery, and after a while, I wished I was home watching a Golden Girls
rerun. I have never been able to sit through a whole episode of Twin Peaks; it’s
a postmodern soap opera, which means that every time someone onscreen eats
a piece of apple pie, you can hear a thousand grad students start typing their
doctoral dissertations on “Twin Peaks: David Lynch and the Semiotics of Cob¬
bler.”
In Wild at Heart, Nicolas Cage is the studly drifter in a snakeskin jacket, and
Laura Dem is the small-town sexpot; they hop into a flashy convertible and high-
tail it through the South, hoping to escape Laura’s nasty mother and to discover
surrealistic vignettes of American grotesquerie. Nicolas and Laura have lots of
sex, and the screen turns different colors, just like it did for Mitzi Gaynor in
South Pacific. The sex is really conventional, though; only Laura is naked, and
the sheets are always awkwardly tucked around anything really interesting.
Eventually, supporting actors die in car accidents, or get set on fire, or have their
heads blown off with shotguns, and all the people in the theater thought it was
visually arresting and a stunning treatment of classic American bloodshed, which
Libby Gelman-Waxner
437
is not what they’d say about the same sort of thing in a Rambo movie, where at
least it’s fun and there aren’t any allusions to The Wizard of Oz.
After Dark, My Sweet was my next film noir, although I suspect it might actu¬
ally be some sort of NASA stress test; they could show it continually to astro¬
nauts to see how long humans can exist in space without entertainment. This
movie was not just boring, it was like a two-week sleep-over visit from my aunt
Frieda, my uncle Morty, who has to keep his right leg elevated so the blood clots
won’t reach his brain, and their son, Heshy, who has started an international
computer call-board for other 42-year-olds who still live at home and are in¬
terested in cyborg comics and the Talmud. After Dark, My Sweet is like the ful¬
fillment of some ancient curse; it’s as if God had said, By 1990, if people are
still going to the movies and not getting enough fresh air, I will send down a
punishment.
Jason Patric is the hunky drifter in this movie. He’s an ex-boxer with beard
stubble and a crumpled brown paper bag that he carries everywhere; after a
while, I started to look for the matching shoes. Jason is gorgeous beyond belief,
but this is film noir, so he’s innocent yet troubled and violent, which means a lot
of squinting, as if he’s trying to duplicate Patrick Swayze’s EKG. How do peo¬
ple become drifters, anyway? Do they take an aptitude test that says, You excel
at stumbling along the highway, not changing your underwear, and getting
hooked up with small-time criminals? Jason joins forces with Bruce Dem, who
looks like Big Bird on methadone, and Rachel Ward, who plays the local slutty
alcoholic widow; between the three of them, it’s like the Olympics of terrible
acting, but believe me, Rachel breezes off with the gold. I don’t think Rachel
could believably scream for water if her hair was on fire; it’s like she was put
on the planet to make Ali MacGraw feel better.
Rachel, Jason, and Bruce plot to kidnap a rich little boy, and they do it and
then sort of forget about the kid; it’s like watching a suspenseful crime movie
in which everyone has Alzheimer’s. I must confess that I didn’t stay to see the
end of After Dark, My Sweet, because I felt like I was dying, and I didn’t want my
children to remember me as a segment on A Current Affair entitled “Death with¬
out Butter: Movies That Kill.”
My \istfilm noir was The Hot Spot, and like the other noirs, it takes place some¬
where really arid, in a sort of bleached-out town completely populated by ani¬
mal skulls and art directors. In this movie, Don Johnson plays the drifter, and
he lives in a cheap motel room with a flashing neon sign right outside the win¬
dow; sexy drifters always request that room. Don is broke, but his ’4os-style
wardrobe is always impeccably dry-cleaned; he gets a job as a used-car salesman
and messes around with Virginia Madsen, who plays the steamy slut married to
Don’s boss, and also with Jennifer Connelly, who plays a beautiful, innocent girl
working as an accountant. Eventually, Don robs a bank, Virginia gives her hus-
438
Genre
band a heart attack by tying him to the bed and wearing lingerie, and Jennifer
snatches the Olympic honors from Rachel Ward without even trying. I read that
Jennifer is currently enrolled at Yale, in the tradition of Jennifer Beals and of
Brooke Shields, who went to Princeton. Jennifer, you’re a knockout, but get
that degree.
Virginia is naked a lot in this movie; at one point, she and Don are tussling
in the moonlight out at a sawmill, and she jumps into a huge hill of wood chips.
Then she climbs the hill while the camera shoots her from underneath and be¬
hind; she grabs Don, and they fall into the sawdust and make churning, passionate
love. Doing it in sawdust does not strike me as particularly erotic; it would be
like having sex in the salad bar at Sizzler—everything would stick to you and
itch. Don keeps unveiling his naked behind, as if it were an engagement ring from
FortunofP s; after about the fourth rear display, I began to wonder if Don even
had a penis. Then I remembered that Pamela Des Barres, a famous groupie, wrote
in her autobiography about how well endowed Don is—Don, she didn’t write
about how pink and hefty your tush is, if you catch my drift. If Virginia is going
to risk a sawdust infection, or even Dutch elm disease, the least you can do is
swivel.
Since I couldn’t figure out why people lik efilm noir, I tried to put myself,
Libby, in a.film noir situation. I pictured myself lounging between my Wamsutta
percales while my husband, Josh, was out correcting overbites; I imagined that
I was listless and in heat. If a drifter came to my door, I decided that the first
thing I would do would be to send him out to wait on line for tickets to Miss Saigon.
Then I would make him finish college or get some sort of vocational training,
since I couldn’t very well introduce him to people by saying, This is so-and-so,
you’ll love him, he’s a drifter. Then, ifhe still tried to entice me into killing my
husband or pulling a bank job, I would say, Excuse me, do you have any idea what
it’s like for a woman in prison? Listening to Jean Harris whine all day about her
royalties? Discussing a possible appeal with Joel Steinberg at the prison mixer?
Then, if by some mad chance the drifter did convince me to kill my husband, I’d
just say, Let’s wait a few years; Josh is an overweight Jewish man from a family
with a history of prostate trouble—time is on our side. If the drifter wanted to
have sweaty, wild sex with me while we waited, I would tell him just what I tell
my adorable seven-year-old daughter, Jennifer, whenever she wants the latest
thing from L. A. Gear: if you still want it a year from now, then we’ll see.
Maybe I’m justnot a noir type of person; I think that lust and destiny and doom
sound like home-shopping-club colognes. Film noir is like Jerry Lewis: it’s some¬
thing French people only pretend to like in order to upset Americans. Maybe
to get back at them, we should all pretend to like Isabelle Huppert movies and
that new glass pyramid in front of the Louvre. That’ll fix ’em, if you ask me.
Dibcctobs
Luis Bunuel
Luis Bunuel (1900—1983) has one of the most distinctive styles of all directors; it is dif¬
ficult to watch even a minute or two from any of his pictures without suspecting, or being
sure, that it is by him. Yet he works with a strange bluntness; he tells the story simply, as
if it is a task rather than an exercise, and the characters, approached so directly, denied
the usual evasions of manners and personal styles, are splayed on the screen like speci¬
mens. Bunuel regards them as ridiculous above all else, and as they parade their greeds
and lusts, he is chortling at their transparency. His autobiography, which was written in
close collaboration with his longtime writer Jean-Claude Carriere, ends with a beautiful
notion: Hefears dying because he will be forever denied the contents of tomorrow’s news¬
paper. Here he tells of early days in Paris, when he and Salvador Dali, heady with the
founding of surrealism, made one of thefew shortfilms that anyone who cares at all about
the movies will sooner or later see.
from My Last Sigh
A few months later, I made Un Chien andalou, which came from an encounter
between two dreams. When I arrived to spend a few days at Dali’s house in
Figueras, 1 told him about a dream I’d had in which a long, tapering cloud sliced
the moon in half, like a razor blade slicing through an eye. Dali immediately told
me that he’d seen a hand crawling with ants in a dream he’d had the previous
night.
“And what if we started right there and made a film?” he wondered aloud.
Despite my hesitation, we soon found ourselves hard at work, and in less than
a week we had a script. Our only rule was very simple: No idea or image that
might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We
had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised
44 1
442
Directors
us, without trying to explain why. The amazing thing was that we never had the
slightest disagreement; we spent a week of total identification.
“A man fires a double bass,” one of us would say.
“No,” replied the other, and the one who’d proposed the idea accepted the
veto and felt it justified. On the other hand, when the image proposed by one
was accepted by the other, it immediately seemed luminously right and ab¬
solutely necessary to the scenario.
When the script was finished, I realized that we had such an original and
provocative movie that no ordinary production company would touch it. So once
again I found myself asking my mother for backing, which, thanks to our sym¬
pathetic attorney, she consented to provide. I wound up taking the money back
to Paris and spending half of it in my usual nightclubs; ultimately, however, I
settled down and contacted the actors Pierre Batcheff and Simone Mareuil, Du-
verger the cameraman, and made a deal to use the Billancourt studios.
The filming took two weeks; there were only five or six of us involved, and
most of the time no one quite knew what he was doing.
“Stare out the window and look as if you’re listening to Wagner,” I remem¬
ber telling Batcheff. “No, no—not like that. Sadder. Much sadder.”
Batcheff never even knew what he was supposed to be looking at, but given
the technical knowledge I’d managed to pick up, Duverger and I got along fa¬
mously. Dali arrived on the set a few days before the end and spent most of his
time pouring wax into the eyes of stuffed donkeys. He played one of the two
Marist brothers who in one scene are painfully dragged about by Batcheff. For
some reason, we wound up cutting the scene. You can see Dali in the distance,
however, running with my fiancee, Jeanne, after the hero’s fatal fall.
Once the film was edited, we had no idea what to do with it. I’d kept it fairly
secret from the Montparnasse contingent, but one day at the Dome, Theriade,
from the Cahiers d'Art, who’d heard rumors about it, introduced me to Man Ray.
Ray had just finished shooting Les Mjsteres du chateau de De, a documentary on
the de Noailles and their friends, and was looking for a second film to round out
the program. Man Ray and I got together a few days later at La Coupole, where
he introduced me to a fellow surrealist, Louis Aragon, who had the most ele¬
gant French manners I’d ever seen. When I told them that Un Chien andalou was
in many ways a surrealist film, they agreed to go to a screening the following
day at the Studio des Ursulines and to start planning the premiere.
More than anything else, surrealism was a kind of call heard by certain peo¬
ple everywhere—in the United States, in Germany, Spain, Yugoslavia—who,
unknown to one another, were already practicing instinctive forms of irrational
expression. Even the poems I’d published in Spain before I’d heard of the sur¬
realist movement were responses to that call which eventually brought all of us
together in Paris. While Dali and I were making Un Chien andalou we used a kind
Luis B u n u e 1
443
of automatic writing. There was indeed something in the air, and my connec¬
tion with the surrealists in many ways determined the course of my life.
My first meeting with the group took place at their regular cafe, the Cyrano,
on the place Blanche, where I was introduced to Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Paul
Eluard, Tristan Tzara, Rene Char, Pierre Unik, Yves Tanguy, Jean Arp, Maxime
Alexandre, and Magritte—everyone, in other words, except Benjamin Peret,
who was in Brazil. We all shook hands, and they bought me a drink, promising
not to miss the premiere of the film that Aragon and Man Ray had already spo¬
ken of so highly.
The opening of Un Chien andalou took place at the Ursulines, and was attended
by the tou£-Paris—some aristocrats, a sprinkling of well-established artists
(among them Picasso, Le Corbusier, Cocteau, Christian Berard, and the com¬
poser Georges Auric), and the surrealist group in toto. I was a nervous wreck.
In fact, I hid behind the screen with the record player, alternating Argentinian
tangos with Tristan and Isolde. Before the show, I’d put some stones in my pocket
to throw at the audience in case of disaster, remembering that a short time be¬
fore, the surrealists had hissed Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le clergyman,
based on a script by Antonin Artaud, which I’d rather liked. I expected the worst;
but, happily, the stones weren’t necessary. After the film ended, I listened to
the prolonged applause and dropped my projectiles discreetly, one by one, on
the floor behind the screen.
My entry into the surrealist group took place very naturally. I was simply ad¬
mitted to the daily meetings at the Cyrano or at Andre Breton’s at 42, rue
Fontaine. The Cyrano was an authentic Pigalle cafe, frequented by the working
class, prostitutes, and pimps. People drank Pernod, or aperitifs like picon-beer
with a hint of grenadine (Yves Tanguy’s favorite; he’d swallow one, then a sec¬
ond, and by the third he had to hold his nose!).
The daily gathering was very much like a Spanish pena. We read an d discussed
certain articles, talked about the surrealist journal, debated any critical action
we felt might be needed, letters to be written, demonstrations attended. When
we discussed confidential issues, we met in Breton’s studio, which was close by.
I remember one amusing misunderstanding that arose because, since I was usu¬
ally one of the last to arrive, I shook hands only with those people nearest me,
then waved to Breton, who was always too far away to reach. “Does Buiiuel have
something against me?” he asked one day, very out of sorts. Finally, someone
explained that I hated the French custom of shaking hands all around every time
anyone went anywhere; it seemed so silly to me that I outlawed the custom on
the set when we were filming Cela s’appelle Taurore.
444
Directors
Ingmar Bergman
I was lucky enough to spend a day once in Stockholm’s Film House, on the set of Ingmar
Bergman’s Face to Face. It was as comfortable as a family reunion, and indeed many of
the crew members—from the carpenter to the woman who served the tea every afternoon —
had been with Bergman for more than twenty years. At noon he let me join him in his of¬
fice, a monk’s cell furnished with two straight chairs, a simple table, and an army cot.
On the table were a box of Dutch chocolates, two apples, a banana, and a copy of the
script. He told me that he found the human face the mostfascinating possible subjectfor
the camera. A few days earlier, he said, he had been watching Antonioni’s The Passen¬
ger on TV, and it wasfollowed by an interview with the director. Said Bergman: "I didn’t
hear a word of what he was saying, because I was looking so closely at his face, his eyes.
The ten minutes he was on the screen were morefascinatin g than any of his, or my, work."
For Bergman, the process ofmaking a film often involved such journeys into the nature of
being human. Here he describes a day on the set of Fanny and Alexander (1982), the
last film he directed.
from The Magic Lantern
I have chosen a day’s filming in 1982. According to my notes, it was cold—
twenty degrees Celsius below zero. I woke up as usual at five o’clock, which
means I was woken, drawn as if in a spiral by some evil spirit out of my deep¬
est sleep, and I was wide awake. To combat hysteria and the sabotage of my bow¬
els, I got out of bed immediately and for a few moments stood quite still on the
floor with my eyes closed. I went over my actual situation. How was my body,
how was my soul and, most of all, what had got to be done today? I established
that my nose was blocked (the dry air), my left testicle hurt (probably cancer),
my hip ached (the same old pain), and there was a ringing in my bad ear (un¬
pleasant but not worth bothering about). I also registered that my hysteria was
Ingmar Bergman
445
under control, my fear of stomach cramp not too intensive. The day’s work con¬
sisted of the scene between Ismael and Alexander, in Fanny and Alexander, and I
was worried because the scene in question might be beyond the capacity of my
brave young actor in the title role, Bertil Guve. But the coming collaboration
with Stina Ekblad as Ismael gave me a jolt of happy expectation. The first in¬
spection ofthedaywas thus completed and had produced a small but nevertheless
positive profit: if Stina is as good as I think, I can manage Bertil-Alexander. I had
already thought out two strategies: one with equally good actors, the other with
a principal actor and a secondary actor.
Now it was a question of taking things calmly, of being calm.
At seven o’clock, my wife Ingrid and I had breakfast together in friendly si¬
lence. My stomach was acquiescent and had forty-five minutes in which to cre¬
ate hell. While I was waiting for it to decide on its attitude, I read the morning
papers. At a quarter to eight, I was fetched and driven to the studio, which at
that particular time was in Sundbyberg and was owned by Europafilm Ltd.
Those once so reputable studios were decaying. They produced mainly
videos, and any staff left from the days of film were disorientated and down¬
hearted. The actual film studio was dirty, not sound-proof, and badly maintained.
The editing room, at first sight comically luxurious, turned out to be useless.
The projectors were wretched, incapable of keeping either definition or stills.
The sound was bad, the ventilation did not function and the carpet was filthy.
At exactly nine o’clock, the day’s filming started. It was important that our
collective start was punctual. Discussions and uncertainties had to take place out¬
side this innermost circle of concentration. From this moment on, we were a
complicated but uniformly functioning machine, the aim of which was to pro¬
duce living pictures.
The work quickly settled into a calm rhythm, and intimacy was uncompli¬
cated. The only thing to disturb this day was the lack of sound-proofing and the
lack of respect for the red lamps outside in the corridor and elsewhere. Other¬
wise it was a day of modest delight. From the very first moment, we all felt Stina
Ekblad’s remarkable empathy with the ill-fated Ismael and, best of all, Bertil-
Alexander had at once accepted the situation. In that strange way children have,
he gave expression to a complicated mixture of curiosity and fear with touch¬
ing genuineness.
The rehearsals moved on smoothly and a quiet cheerfulness reigned, our cre¬
ativity dancing along. Anna Asp had created a stimulating set for us. Sven Nykvist
had done the lighting with that intuition which is difficult to describe, but which
is his hallmark and makes him one of the leading lighting camera men in the
world, perhaps the best. If you asked him how he did it, he would point out some
simple ground rules (which have been of great use to me in my work in the the¬
atre) . He could not—or had no wish to—describe the actual secret. If for some
446 Directors
reason he was disturbed, pressurized or ill at ease, everything went wrong and
he would have to start all over again from the beginning. Confidence and total
security prevailed in our collaboration. Occasionally I grieve over the fact that
we shall never work together again. I grieve when I think back to a day such as
the one I have depicted. There’s a sensual satisfaction in working in close union
with strong, independent and creative people: actors, assistants, electricians,
production staff, props people, make-up staff, costume designers, all those per¬
sonalities who populate the day and make it possible to get through.
Sometimes I really feel the loss of everything and everyone concerned. I un¬
derstand what Fellini means when he says filming to him is a way of life and I
also understand his little story about Anita Ekberg. Her last scene in La Dolce
Vita took place in a car erected in the studio. When the scene had been taken
and filming was over as far as she was concerned, she started crying and refused
to leave the car, gripping firmly onto the wheel. She had to be carried out of
the studio with gentle force.
Sometimes there is a special happiness in being afilm director. An unrehearsed
expression is bom just like that, and the camera registers that expression. That
was exactly what happened that day. Unprepared and unrehearsed, Alexander
turned very pale, a look of sheer agony appearing on his face. The camera reg¬
istered the moment. The agony, the intangible, was there for a few seconds and
never returned. Neither was it there earlier, but the strip of film caught the mo¬
ment. That is when I think days and months of predictable routine have paid off.
It is possible I live for those brief moments.
Like a pearl fisher.
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Hitchcock (1899—1980) devised a certain number of things to say about his
movies, and he said them over and over again all his life. I interviewed him twice, and 1
was never able to get him to say anything 1 had not already read, in one form or another,
in books about him. Even his fellow director Francois Truffaut, in the wondeful book-
length Hitchcock/Truffaut, is able to pry revelations out of him only after great pains,
and most of the interesting things said about Hitchcock movies in that book are said by
A lfr e d Hitchcock
447
Truffaut, with Hitchcock responding in surprise or gratification. What 1 cannot decide is
whether Hitchcock realty did believe in his oft-repeated methods and formulas or whether
they were designed to throw us off the track—since in Hitchcock’s work there is always
that sinister sense that something else is going on beneath the surface. Here is an article
printed in Sight & Sound in 1937 , with Hitchcock already polished as he reels off his
familiar assertion that the real work on hisfilms is all in the preparation, with the ac¬
tual filmin g an anticlimax. His mistrust of Ion g takes is revealin g; they give the actor too
much freedom, we can guess,from the control Hitchcock maintains with his story-boarded
scripts that dfine every shot.
“My Own Methods”
Many people think a film director does all his work in the studio, drilling the
actors, making them do what he wants. That is not at all true of my own meth¬
ods, and I can write only of my own methods. I like to have a film complete in
my mind before I go on the floor. Sometimes the first idea one has of a film is
of a vague pattern, a sort of haze with a certain shape. There is possibly a colour¬
ful opening developing into something more intimate; then, perhaps in the mid¬
dle, a progression to a chase or some other adventure; and sometimes at the end
the big shape of a climax, or maybe some twist or surprise. You see this hazy
pattern, and then you have to find a narrative idea to suit it. Or a story may give
you an idea first and you have to develop it into a pattern.
Imagine an example of a standard plot—let us say a conflict between love
and duty. This idea was the origin of my first talkie, Blackmail. The hazy pattern
one saw beforehand was duty—love—love versus duty—and finally either duty
or love, one or the other. The whole middle section was built up on the theme
of love versus duty, after duty and love had been introduced separately in turn.
So I had first to put on the screen an episode expressing duty.
I showed the arrest of a criminal by Scotland Yard detectives, and tried to
make it as concrete and detailed as I could. You even saw the detectives take the
man to the lavatory to wash his hands—nothing exciting, just the routine of duty.
Then the young detective says he’s going out that evening with his girl, and the
sequence ends, pointing on from duty to love. Then you start showing the re¬
lationship between the detective and his girl: they are middle-class people. The
love theme doesn’t run smoothly; there is a quarrel and the girl goes off by her¬
self, just because the young man has kept her waiting a few minutes. So your
story starts; the girl falls in with the villain—he tries to seduce her and she kills
him. Now you’ve got your problem prepared. Next morning, as soon as the de-
448 Directors
tective is put on to the murder case, you have your conflict—love versus duty.
The audience know that he will be trying to track down his own girl, who has
done the murder, so you sustain their interest: they wonder what will happen
next.
The blackmailer was really a subsidiary theme. I wanted him to go through
and expose the girl. That was my idea of how the story ought to end. I wanted
the pursuit to be after the girl, not after the blackmailer. That would have
brought the conflict on to a climax, with the young detective, ahead of the oth¬
ers, trying to push the girl out through a window to get her away, and the girl
turning round and saying: “You can’t do that—I must give myself up.” Then the
rest of the police arrive, misinterpret what he is doing, and say, “Good man,
you’ve got her,” not knowing the relationship between them. Now the reason
for the opening comes to light. You repeat every shot used first to illustrate the
duty theme, only now it is the girl who is the criminal. The young man is there
ostensibly as a detective, but of course the audience know he is in love with the
girl. The girl is locked up in her cell and the two detectives walk away, and the
older one says, “Going out with your girl tonight?” The younger one shakes his
head. “No. Not tonight.”
That was the ending I wanted for Blackmail, but I had to change it for com¬
mercial reasons. The girl couldn’t be left to face her fate. And that shows you
how the films suffer from their own power of appealing to millions. They could
often be subtler than they are, but their own popularity won’t let them.
But to get back to the early work on a film. With the help of my wife, who
does the technical continuity, I plan out a script very carefully, hoping to fol¬
low it exactly, all the way through, when shooting starts. In fact, this working
on the script is the real making of the film, for me. When I’ve done it, the film
is finished already in my mind. Usually, too, I don’t find it necessary to do more
than supervise the editing myself.
Settings, of course, come into the preliminary plan, and usually I have fairly
clear ideas about them; I was an art student before I took up with films. Some¬
times I even think of backgrounds first. The Man Who Knew Too Much started like
that; I looked in my mind’s eye at snowy Alps and dingy London alleys, and threw
my characters into the middle of the contrast. Studio settings, however, are often
a problem; one difficulty is that extreme effects—extremes of luxury or ex¬
tremes of squalor—are much the easiest to register on the screen. If you try to
reproduce the average sitting-room in Golders Green or Streatham it is apt to
come out looking like nothing in particular, just nondescript. It is true that I have
tried lately to get interiors giving a real lower-middle-class atmosphere—for in¬
stance, the Verlocs’ living room in Sabotage —but there’s always a certain risk
in giving your audience humdrum truth.
However, in time the script and the sets are finished somehow and we are
A If r e d Hitchcock
449
ready to start shooting. One great problem that occurs at once, and keeps on
occurring, is to get the players to adapt themselves to film technique. Many of
them, of course, come from the stage; they are not cinema-minded at all. So,
quite naturally, they like to play long scenes straight ahead. But if I have to shoot
a long scene continuously I always feel I am losing grip on it, from a cinematic
point of view. The camera, I feel, is simply standing there, hoping to catch some¬
thing with a visual point to it. I want to put my film together on the screen, not
simply to photograph something that has been put together already in the form
of a long piece of stage acting. This is what gives an effect of life to a picture—
the feeling that when you see it on the screen you are watching something that
has been conceived and brought to birth directly in visual terms.
You can see an example of what I mean in Sabotage. Just before Verloc is killed
there is a scene made up entirely of short pieces of film, separately photographed.
This scene has to show how Verloc comes to be killed—how the thought of
killing him arises in Sylvia Sidney’s mind and connects itself with the carving knife
she uses when they sit down to dinner. But the sympathy of the audience has to
be kept with Sylvia Sidney; it must be clear that Verloc’s death, finally, is an ac¬
cident. So, as she serves at the table, you see her unconsciously serving vegeta¬
bles with the carving knife, as though her hand were keeping hold of the knife
of its own accord. The camera cuts from her hand to her eyes and back to her
hand; then back to her eyes as she suddenly becomes aware of the knife, mak¬
ing its error. Then to a normal shot—the man unconcernedly eating; then back
to the hand holding the knife. In an older style of acting Sylvia would have had
to show the audience what was passing in her mind by exaggerated facial ex¬
pression. But people today in real life often don’t show their feelings in their
faces: so the film treatment showed the audience her mind through her hand,
throughits unconscious grasp on the knife. Now the camera moves again to Ver¬
loc—back to the knife—back again to his face. You see him seeing the knife,
realising its implication. The tension between the two is built up with the knife
as its focus.
Now when the camera has immersed the audience so closely in a scene such
as this, it can’t instantly become objective again. It must broaden the movement
of the scene without loosening the tension. Verloc gets up and walks round the
table, coming so close to the camera that you feel, if you are sitting in the audi¬
ence, almost as though you must move back to make room for him. Then the
camera moves to Sylvia Sidney again, then returns to the subject—the knife.
So you gradually build up the psychological situation, piece by piece, using
the camera to emphasise first one detail, then another. The point is to draw the
audience right inside the situation instead of leaving them to watch it from out¬
side, from a distance. And you can do this only by breaking the action up into
details and cutting from one to the other, so that each detail is forced in turn on
Directors
45 °
the attention of the audience and reveals its psychological meaning. If you played
the whole scene straight through, and simply made a photographic record of it
with the camera always in one position, you would lose your power over the
audience. They would watch the scene without becoming really involved in it,
and you would have no means of concentrating their attention on those partic¬
ular visual details which make them feel what the characters are feeling.
One way of using the camera to give emphasis is the reaction shot. By the re¬
action shot 1 mean any close-up which illustrates an event by showing instantly
the reaction to it of a person or a group. The door opens for someone to come
in, and before showing who it is you cut to the expressions of the persons al¬
ready in the room. Or, while one person is talking, you keep your camera on
someone else who is listening. This over-running of one person’s image with
another person’s voice is a method peculiar to the talkies; it is one of the de¬
vices which help the talkies to tell a story faster than a silent film could tell it,
and faster than it could be told on the stage.
Or, again, you can use the camera to give emphasis whenever the attention
of the audience has to be focused for a moment on a certain player. There is no
need for him to raise his voice or move to the centre of the stage or do anything
dramatic. A close-up will do it all for him—will give him, so to speak, the stage
all to himself.
I must say that in recent years I have come to make much less use of obvious
camera devices. I have become more commercially-minded; afraid that anything
at all subtle may be missed. 1 have leamt from experience how easily small
touches are overlooked.
The film always has to deal in exaggerations. Its methods reflect the simple
contrasts of black and white photography. One advantage of colour is that it
would give you more intermediate shades. I should never want to fill the screen
with colour: it ought to be used economically—to put new words into the
screen’s visual language when there’s a need for them. You could start a colour
film with a boardroom scene: sombre panelling and furniture, the directors all
in dark clothes and white collars. Then the chairman’s wife comes in, wearing
a red hat. She takes the attention of the audience at once, just because of that
one note of colour.
A journalist once asked me about distorted sound—a device I tried in Black¬
mail when the word “knife” hammers on the consciousness of the girl at break¬
fast on the morning after the murder. Again, I think this kind of effect may be
justified. There have always been occasions when we have needed to show a
phantasmagoria of the mind in terms of visual imagery. So we may want to show
someone’s mental state by letting him listen to some sound—let us say church
bells—and making them clang with distorted insistence in his head. But on the
whole nowadays I try to tell a story in the simplest possible way, so that I can
feel sure it will hold the attention of any audience and won’t puzzle them.
A IJt e d Hitchcock
45 i
I know there are critics who ask why lately I have made only thrillers. Am I
satisfied, they say, with putting on the screen the equivalent merely of popular
novelettes? Part of the answer is that I am out to get the best stories I can which
will suit the film medium, and I have usually found it necessary to take a hand
in writing them myself. There is a shortage of good writing for the screen. In
this country we can’t usually afford to employ large writing staffs, so I have had
to join in and become a writer myself. I choose crime stories because that is the
kind of story I can write, or help to write, myself—the kind of story I can turn
most easily into a successful film. It is the same with Charles Bennett, who has
so often worked with me; he is essentially a writer of melodrama. I am ready
to use other stories, but I can’t find writers who will give them to me in a suit¬
able form.
Sometimes I have been asked what films I should make if I were free to do
exactly as I liked without having to think about the box-office. There are sev¬
eral examples I can give very easily. For one thing, I should like to make travel
films with a personal element in them. Or I should like to do a verbatim of a
celebrated trial. The Thompson-Bywaters case, for instance. The cinema could
reconstruct the whole story. Or there is the fire at sea possibility—that has never
been tackled seriously on the screen. It might be too terrifying for some audi¬
ences, but it would make a great subject worthwhile.
British producers are often urged to make more films about characteristic
phases of English lif e.
Why, they are asked, do we see so little of the English farmer or the English
seaman? Or is there not plenty of good material in the great British industries—
in mining or shipbuilding or steel? One difficulty here is that English audiences
seem to take more interest in American life—I suppose because it has a novelty
value. They are rather easily bored by everyday scenes in their own country.
But I certainly should like to make a film of the Derby, only it might not be quite
in the popular class. It would be hard to invent a Derby story that wasn’t hack¬
neyed, conventional. I would rather do it more as a documentary—a sort of
pageant, an animated modem version of Frith’s “Derby Day.” I would show
everything that goes on all round the course, but without a story.
Perhaps the average audience isn’t ready for that, yet. Popular taste, all the
same, does move; today you can put over scenes that would have been ruled
out a few years ago. Particularly towards comedy, nowadays, there is a differ¬
ent attitude. You can get comedy out of your stars, and you used not to be al¬
lowed to do anything which might knock the glamour off them.
In 1926 I made a film called Downhill, from a play by Ivor Novello, who acted
in the film himself, with Ian Hunter and Isabel Jeans. There was a sequence show¬
ing a quarrel between Hunter and Novello. It started as an ordinary fight; then
they began throwing things at one another. They tried to pick up heavy pedestals
to throw and the pedestals bowled them over. In other words I made it comic.
452
Directors
I even put Hunter into a morning coat and striped trousers because I felt that a
man never looks so ridiculous as when he is well dressed and fighting. This whole
scene was cut out; they said I was guying Ivor Novello. It was ten years before
its time.
I think public taste is turning to like comedy and drama more mixed up; and
this is another move away from the conventions of the stage. In a play your di¬
visions are much more rigid; you have a scene in one key—then curtain, and
after an interval another scene starts. In a film you keep your whole action flow¬
ing; you can have comedy and drama running together and weave them in and
out. Audiences are much readier now than they used to be for sudden changes
of mood; and this means more freedom for a director. The art of directing for
the commercial market is to know just how far you can go. In many ways I am
freer now to do what I want to do than I was a few years ago. I hope in time to
have more freedom still—if audiences will give it to me.
Michael Powell
The British director Michael Powell had a career of dazzling success, followed hy puzzling
failure and then by the scandal of his 19 £0film Peeping Tom, which received some of
the most scathing reviews in London history. Then there was a period in which his films
(made in partnership with the writer Emetic Pressburger, as the Archers) seemed all but
forgotten, savefor the durable classics The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. Powell was
rescuedfrom obscurity and relative poverty first by thefilm critic David Thomson, whose
Biographical Dictionary of Film contained a glowing entry about the director. Powell
wrote thanking Thomson, who invited him to teach at Dartmouth College. The trip to
America led to Powell’s meeting Martin Scorsese, a devotee of the Archers films since he
was eleven or twelve years old, and Scorsese’s editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who eventu¬
ally became Powell’s wife. The two directors made laser disc versions of several Powellfilms,
discussing them on a parallel sound track in intriguing and detailed analyses. Powell's
life in the cinema began in the silent era and included a stretch as the stills man for Al¬
fred Hitchcock. Hitchcock left England to work in Hollywood in the late 1930s; Powell
found he was not suited to the climate of big studios and poweful producers, as his mem¬
ories of David 0 . Selznick illustrate.
Michael Powell
4S 3
from A Life in Movies
There was nothing invisible about David O. Selznick. He came to meet the au¬
dience beaming, with hands outstretched, like Elmer Gantry. He was certain of
his mission, which was to make great films. For him, Great was Big, and this
confusion of the two adjectives was to haunt him all his life and prevent him ever
becoming Great, although he was certainly Big. He achieved the ultimate in Big¬
ness with his production of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, but before
that he had left his father-in-law’s stables and set up for himself down the road
as an independent producer. There he had surprised everybody by producing
some excellent hard-hitting comedies like Nothing Sacred, starring Fredric March
and Carole Fombard, and by signing up Alfred Hitchcock and bringing him over
from England to direct Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, starring Joan Fontaine and
Laurence Olivier. Vivien Leigh accompanied Larry on this trip to Hollywood
and in this way met Selznick, which resulted in her being cast as Scarlett O ’ Hara
in Gone with the Wind. Rebecca was a great success and, as I have already related,
Hitchcock stayed with Selznick through the war, learning the Hollywood game
and assembling his forces around him, including stars like Cary Grant, James
Stewart and Ingrid Bergman.
Somewhere about i 943 or 1944 Henry King, one of the great old-timers,
directed a film for Fox about Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, from a book entitled
The Song of Bernadette. The part of the peasant girl who has a vision of the Virgin
Mary was played by an actress hitherto unknown, Jennifer Jones. It made her a
star overnight. She was one of the most beautiful and talented young creatures
that I have ever seen. She had the grace, strength and agility of an untamed an¬
imal, and I never tired of watching her. At the time she rocketed to stardom she
appeared to be a teenager, but she had actually been married for four years to
an actor, Robert Walker, and had two sons by him. He was a sensitive and in¬
telligent young man in steady demand, and had already been spotted by Hitch¬
cock who played him in one of his more popular melodramas, Strangers on a Train.
That film, like Bernadette, was in black and white. It must be remembered that
at this period most films were in black and white, but Dr. Kalmus and his wife,
Nathalie, had given us a long lead in England by establishing a Technicolor lab
at Heathrow just before the war and were anxious to help us in any way they
could to make big films in colour. If you are a film-maker, you think in black
and white or you think in colour. The Archers thought in colour from The Thief
of Bagdad onwards.
Selznick had also experimented in colour with his comedies and, of course,
the monumental Gone with the Wind had to be in colour. Scarlett O ’ Hara and
4J4
Directors
Rhett Butler were unthinkable in black and white. But big films like the Hitch¬
cock productions of Rebecca or Spellbound were still being made in black and
white, particularly since Hitch thought his stories out in terms of black and white
images and was uncomfortable in colour. His later films never showed a flair
for colour, and his most commercial film, Psycho, was shot in black and white
with a television crew.
When David O. first met Jennifer Jones, he went off the deep end. The ef¬
fect upon this megalomaniac was terrible. Her name was Phyllis Walker at that
time, and he had created the name of Jennifer Jones for her and then badgered
Henry King and Twentieth Century-Fox to cast her in The Song ofBemadette[,]
for which she had won an Oscar. She triumphed again in Since You Went Away
and Selznick started to plan a new production around her. It had to have his great¬
est male star in it, Gregory Peck. It had to have a great director ... it had to
have three great directors. He told her that he would make her the greatest star
of the world. His intentions were obvious, but she refused to have anything to
do with him. She told him she was happily married and had a family, and I don’t
suppose he heard a word of it. She was under contract to him, and completely
at his mercy as far as work was concerned. Whether she liked it or not, she had
to be in this film that he was preparing for her. There was no escape.
It was a tiny story, not much more than an anecdote, but he blew it up until
it became almost another Gone with the Wind. She was to play a part-Indian girl
and Greg the young rancher. It was set in the Southwest, and was a story of lust
and dust and rape, and was to be in Technicolor. King Vidor, one of the great¬
est of early directors, was to direct it. Later, Josef von Sternberg, the one and
only Josef von Sternberg, was brought in to advise on the production. After Vidor
left the film William Dieterle was brought in to complete it.
It was the most outrageous courtship. Caught in the Hollywood net, the girl
struggled desperately to escape the huntsman, but her struggles and appeals for
mercy were greeted by an avalanche of presents and another million dollars on
the budget of the film. I really believe that David O. added a train wreck to the
picture because she had refused him the night before. In the end, of course, he
triumphed, and by the time the film stopped rolling his wife, Irene, had left him
and the actress’s husband was no longer on the scene.
You might have thought that these Aeschylean results of his passion would
have given him pause, but not a bit of it. He had spent millions to put her on a
throne of blood for everybody to see. He had made her his mistress. Now she
must be his wife. This man was capable of a genuine grand passion. He had pos¬
sessed her body, now she must possess him, body and soul.
She refused. He insisted. He couldn’t understand that he was an object of hor¬
ror in her eyes. For the next four years, wherever they went, whatever they were
doing, he continued to pester her to marry him. He thought of little else day
and night. He never let it drop. What a candidate for La Comedie Humainel
Michael Powell
45 5
The film, of course, was Duel in the Sun. I have described how Emeric and I,
visiting Hollywood for the first time in 194^ in search of an American girl who
turned out to be Kim Hunter, visited Hitchcock at the Selznick Studios and met
David O., who insisted on showing us his favourite sequences from Duel in the
Sun, which was then in production. It had been an interesting experience to sit
with this big boyish man while he acted out his fantasies with the two people on
the screen. First he showed us the rape sequence. The young rancher comes into
the room where the part-Indian girl is scrubbing the floor. He does the cigarette
bit, smoke through the nostrils, the lot, and stands watching her. Conscious of
his glance[,] she turns away from him and the swing of her hips as she works
gives him other ideas. He throws away his cigarette, grabs her, and they strug¬
gle. I glanced at David O. He was watching the screen intently. He wasn’t in
the least interested in my reaction. When the rape was over he rang the pro¬
jectionist and said, “OK, run the duel sequence.” He sat back. This was his
favourite bit. We sat, stunned with boredom, while mile after mile of film was
unrolled of Jennifer Jones crawling up a mountain with a Winchester rifle, and
Gregory Peck crawling down the mountain with another Winchester rife. When
they finally opened fire on each other, Emeric whispered to me, “What a pity
they didn’t shoot the screenwriter.”
I thought of the hot splintered rocks under the Arizona sun, Jennifer Jones’s
bleeding hands, knees, elbows, her face as she dragged herself up the mountain,
trying to act, desperately hoping for the director to say, “Cut!” The reel finished
abruptly. I said chattily, “Poor girl. You certainly made her work for her liv¬
ing.”
The great David O. took a long draw on his cigarette, nodded and drawled,
“Yeah, the poor kid took quite a beating.”
Duel in the Sun would have disgraced any B-movie. David O. thought he could
disguise this by hiring the best director and throwing in a perfectly gratuitous
train wreck, which got a roar of laughter at the Press Show in London, together
with a sunset sequence which must have emptied the Technicolor dye vats for
several months. Not content with that, he added a line of dialogue to the se¬
quence: “There’s a strange glow in the sky tonight,” which brought the house
down. All through the film we felt that the producer was trying to pin the word
“epic” on to a plot that even Richard Wagner would have scorned to have clut¬
tering up his studio. The final film was a piece of pulp bound in morocco.
All through his life David O. was dogged by this confusion between Bigness
and Greatness. He wasn’t content to have made a success with Jennifer. Now
he wanted to make an epic. Eventually he settled upon a story which could have
been told in ten lines, about a girl all of whose problems were solved by a tidal
wave. Christopher Miles’s beautiful film, The Virgin and the Gypsy, from the story
by D. H. Lawrence, has a similar construction; so has my own 1 Know Where I’m
Goingl In the one a dam burst comes roaring down the valley, washing the vir-
456 Directors
gin into bed with the gypsies, in the other the principals get involved in a giant
whirlpool. Both these films were loved by audiences, and I am sure David O.
wanted audiences to love Portrait of Jennie. But his passion for Bigness, as opposed
to Greatness, was too strong for him. He forgot his original intention—of cre¬
ating a great film which would make Jennifer the biggest star in the Hollywood
heavens—and spent all his money on the tidal wave, which was very fine in its
way but which crashed down into empty cinemas because the audience, who
liked stories and didn’t get one, had gone home.
On the evidence, I think we must come to the surprising conclusion that the
great David O. Selznick was a big fraud. He was a producer like other Holly¬
wood producers: a packager, a memo-writer, a picker of other men’s brains—
not a creative person at all. When he worked with good craftsmen—Victor
Fleming, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, George Cukor, Carol
Reed, Powell and Pressburger—he made good pictures. When he didn’t, he
didn’t. He was a great director of other directors. After seeing their dailies he
would send them page after page of criticisms until they threatened to walk out,
and frequently did. Actors and actresses refused to perform if he appeared on
the set, so he had to sneak in unobserved and hide behind the flats if he wanted
to know what was going on. He was a pain in the neck.
John Houseman
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane routinely places first on lists of the greatest films of all time.
It would also place hi gh on any list of the best-documented films ever made because most
of Welles’s associates (Robert Wise, Richard Wilson, and John Houseman among them)
had long and deep memories. Houseman (1902—1988) was Welles’s associate in the Mer¬
cury Theater’s stage and radio productions and had joined him in Hollywood, where the
Mercury group was preparing a new movie. As this selection opens, Houseman is recall¬
ing how the idea for Kane occurred to Herman Mankiewicz (who was to share the screen¬
play credit with Welles) and how it was shaped into the film. Mankiewicz’s inspiration
was the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Mankiewicz was a close friend of
Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, and it is Hollywood lore that during a formal dinner
at Hearst’s San Simeon estate, Mankiewicz, who had drunk too much, threw up and then
observed optimistically, "Well, at least 1 brought up the white wine with the fish.’’
John Houseman
457
from Run-through
In one of its earlier versions, the subject of this prismatic revelation had been a
celebrated criminal like John Dillinger, whose personality and motivations were
to be discovered successively, though not necessarily chronologically, through
the eyes of his doting mother, the brother who hated him, a member of his gang,
his childhood sweetheart, the FBI man who trailed him on his final flight and the
woman who had lived with him for the last month of his life before turning him
in for the reward. Then, while talking with Orson one day, an infinitely better
idea had come to him. As a former newspaperman and an avid reader of con¬
temporary history, he had long been fascinated by the American phenomenon
of William Randolph Hearst. Unlike my friends of the Left to whom Hearst was
now the archenemy, fascist isolationist and labor baiter, Mankiewicz remem¬
bered the years when Hearst had announced himself as the working man’s friend
and a political progressive. He had also observed him as a member of the film
colony—grandiose, aging and vulnerable in the immensity of his reconstructed
palace at San Simeon. By applying his “prism” notion to a figure of such com¬
plexity and stature and adding to it the charisma inherent in the public and pri¬
vate personality of Orson Welles, the possibility of a rich and unusual movie
became apparent.
Welles, in his desperate search for a film subject, had snapped at it instantly.
So did I when I heard it. After Mank and I had talked for several hours and Sarah
had sent dinner up to the room, I phoned Orson from his bedside and told him
I was ready to try. He arrived with a magnum of champagne, and we talked on
until Sarah threw us out. The next day—no longer as president but as a writer—
I made a deal with Mercury Productions for a period of twelve weeks. At Mank’s
insistence and remembering how badly I myself had worked with Orson peer¬
ing over my shoulder, it was clearly stated in the agreement that we would do
our work without interference. Welles would be shown what there was of the
script after six weeks; the rest of it, if he decided he wanted to continue, when
we were finished. It was felt by everyone, especially Sarah, that our only hope
of getting such a difficult script done in such a limited time* was to move
Mankiewicz out of his natural habitat—away from distractions and temptations
of all sorts. The retreat chosen f or us was a guest ranch in the Mesa country near
Victorville at the top of the Cajon Pass.
Two days later, we set out for the San Bernardino Mountains in a small car-
♦Under the luxurious, highly organized studio system of the day it was not uncommon for a script to be prepared
over a period of from nine to eighteen months by five or six different writers.
4j8 Directors
avan that consisted of a studio limousine containing Mankiewicz, prone and
protesting in the back seat, with a trained nurse and two pairs of crutches in the
front, and a convertible driven by myself, containing a secretary, a typewriter
and three cases of stationery and research material. That night the limousine de¬
parted and the next day we went to work.
The Campbell Ranch was owned and run by an intellectual couple, both
lawyers, from Los Angeles. Our life was austere but comfortable; the food mo¬
notonous but adequate; the climate temperate, dry and perfect for work, with
no distractions for a hundred miles around. Since we were there between sea¬
sons we had the place almost to ourselves during the week: weekends were
crowded and there were musicales, symposia and folk dancing at night, from
which we were excused on account of Mank’s leg. He and I shared a bungalow
with two bedrooms and a living room which we used as a study. His nurse was
a long-suffering German body whom Mankiewicz summoned at all hours of the
day and night for unnecessary services. The secretary, discovered and briefed
by Sarah, was a patient, efficient, nice-looking English girl named Rita Alexan¬
der, married to a refugee recently arrived from Europe. No pair of internal rev¬
enue agents could have been more diligent in their daily inspection of Mank’s
room for intoxicants. This precaution proved unnecessary. With no family to
make him feel guilty, no employer to hate and no one to compete with except
an incomprehensible, cultivated, half-gentile hybrid with a British upper-class
accent, the mental and emotional energy which had been squandered for years
in self-generated conflicts and neurotic disorders was now concentrated on the
single task of creating our script. After so many fallow years his fertility was amaz¬
ing.
We started with the image of a man—a giant, a tycoon, a glamor figure, a
controller of public opinion, a legend in his own lifetime—who had entered the
world with all possible advantages, exploited them to the full, yet failed to
achieve most of what he really wanted from life—including love. As we talked
we asked each other how this man had got to be the way he was, made the choices
he did. In the process we discovered what persons were associated with him;
we learned what brought them together and what he did with them and to them
over the years. In deciding who was qualified, personally and historically, to tell
his story and reflect his image, in selecting the “prisms” which would most
clearly reveal the parts from which we must finally create a whole, we found
the dramatic structure of the film gradually asserting itself.
By trial and error we reduced the number of principal witnesses to five—
each with different attitudes and subjective versions of the events of this man’s
life: the lawyer-guardian, who had observed him with exasperated and impo¬
tent disapproval in childhood, at the height of his fortunes and in his final, pre¬
dictable collapse; his manager, who followed him with slavish and admiring
John Houseman
4T9
devotion from the beginning of his career through his greatest triumphs and down
again; the friend who understood him better than anyone else and who, for that
reason, finally split with him; his mistress, whom he came closest to loving and
who, through no fault of her own, helped to destroy him and finally left him;
the servant, who saw only the ruin and the folly and the lonely end.
In the brouhaha that preceded and followed the first Hollywood press show¬
ings of Citizen Kane, amid the accusations and denials, the massive pressures and
the truculent ref utations, the whole question of Kane ’ s identification with Hearst
became wildly confused. The truth is simple: for the basic concept of Charles
Foster Kane and for the main lines and significant events of his public life,
Mankiewicz used as his model the figure of William Randolph Hearst. To this
were added incidents and details invented or derived from other sources.
The main parallels are obvious. Both Kane and Hearst, as young men, en¬
tered the newspaper field by taking over a dying metropolitan daily into which
each poured his inherited treasure at the rate of one million dollars a year. The
calculated sensationalism, the use of patriotism as a circulation builder—these
form part of the Hearst legend to which were grafted anecdotes from other gi¬
ants of journalism, including Pulitzer, Northcliffe and Mank’s first boss, Her¬
bert Bayard Swope. Kane’s political career and Hearst’s are similar: Hearst ran
on a reform ticket for mayor and then for governor of New York. (According
to journalistic legend he had two special editions of the Journal ready to go to
press on election night—one headed hearst wins, the other fraud at polls.)
He was defeated (not, like Kane, following a sex scandal) as proof of the Amer¬
ican political axiom that money and power cannot, by themselves, win the peo¬
ple’s vote. Both Hearst and Kane had unsuccessful first marriages; both took up
in middle age with blonde young women whose professional careers (in differ¬
ent fields) they obstinately and vainly promoted in a tradition of American ty¬
coons that includes McCormick, Brulatour and Samuel Insull. Both Hearst and
Kane saw their empires collapse in the Depression. Both ended their days in ex¬
travagant and tedious retirement. Xanadu, the ultimate American vision of
heaven on earth, was directly modeled after Hearst’s San Simeon, which Mank
had personally observed and which he now recreated in all its exorbitant folly,
complete with private zoo, motorcade picnics, oversize Renaissance fireplaces
and jigsaw puzzles.*
♦This is where the film ran into trouble. 11 is unlikely that anyone would have bothered about the obvious paral¬
lels in the public lives of Hearst and Kane, but with the invasion ofXanadu a particularly sensitive nerve was touched.
Not only Mankiewicz but every male and female columnist in Hollywood, not to mention actors, directors and
film executives by the dozens had been entertained at San Simeon and had witnessed the embarrassing boredom
of their aging unmarried hosts. To expose this in a movie seemed unethical, ungrateful and dangerous. Hearst,
even in his decline, remained a powerful national figure: by uttering shrill cries of hypocritical indignation, the in¬
dustry and the press were protecting themselves from the wrath to come.
460
Directors
With the single exception of Susan Alexander whose situation, though not
her personality, clearly resembled that of Marion Davies, our “witnesses” had
no individual equivalents in the life of William Randolph Hearst. Bernstein (to
whom we gave some of the characteristics of Everett Sloane, who would be play¬
ing the part, and the surname of Orson’s guardian, a music-loving doctor from
Chicago) was the prototype of the shrewd, unquestioningly loyal business man¬
ager. Jed Leland, Kane’s best friend, was superficially modeled after Ashton
Stevens, the drama critic, a long-time friend of Hearst and, incidentally, of
Orson’s father. Thatcher, the guardian-lawyer-banker, was a wholly fictitious
personage, to whom Mank added, mainly for his own amusement, overtones of
J. P. Morgan, including a recent newsreel in which the haughty financier had
been subjected, during a Congressional investigation, to the humiliation of being
photographed with a midget on his knee.
This seemingly irrelevant clip was typical of the use he made throughout the
script of newsreel material—real, reconstructed and imagined.* Assembled in
staccato March of Time style and first shown as a summary of the fabulous career
of Charles Foster Kane immediately after his death, many of those clips were
repeated later in the body of the film, no longer as newsreels but as part of Kane’s
personal story. From this constant cross-fertilization between myth, fact and fic¬
tion the film acquired much of its vitality and dimension.
Throughout our work on the screenplay of what later came to be called Cit¬
izen Kane, we had one special advantage: we were not working in a vacuum, de¬
veloping a script for some absent producer; we were—and we never for one
instant forgot it—creating a vehicle suited to the personality and creative en¬
ergy of a man who, at twenty-four, was himself only slightly less fabulous than
the mythical hero he would be portraying. And the deeper we penetrated be¬
yond the public events into the heart of Charles Foster Kane, the closer we
seemed to come to the identity of Orson Welles.
Orson was aware of this. Far from resisting the resemblance, he pushed it
even further when he came to shoot the film. Between young Kane and young
Welles there is more than a surface likeness: in the dramatized person of Charles
Foster Kane, “Champagne Charley” was finally able to realize extravagances that
far exceeded anything achieved in life by Richard Welles and his precocious son.
Kane’s fury, too, was of a special and recognizable kind. A vague aura of vio¬
lence surrounded the Hearst legend: there was the persistent rumor of the fatal
shooting, in a jealous rage, of a well-known Hollywood director on a yacht off
the Malibu coast. We made no reference to that episode in our script. We did
*In our search for related material we became veritable magpies: the Reporter's first interview with Susan Kane in
a sleazy bar in Atlantic City was based on a recent interview with Evelyn Nesbitt Thaw in the run-down nightclub
where she was performing.
John Houseman
46 1
not need it. The wanton, wordless, destructive fury which Kane wreaks upon
the inanimate objects in his wife’s room when he realizes that she has left him
was taken directly from our recent scene in the upper room at Chasen’s. Dur¬
ing its filming, Orson reproduced with frightening fidelity the physical gestures
and the blind agony of rage with which he had hurled those flaming Sternos
against the wall. The cuts he received on his hands on both occasions were, I
was told, almost identical.
Our days and nights on the Campbell Ranch followed a reassuring routine.
Mankiewicz wrote and read half the night and slept in the morning. I got up early,
had my breakfast in the main house so as not to disturb him, then went riding
for an hour—my first contact with a horse since the Estancia Santa Maria. After
that, while I waited for him to come to life, I would edit the pages Mank had
dictated the night before, which the secretary had typed at dawn. At nine-thirty
Mank received his breakfast in bed. An hour later, having made an enormous
production of shaving, washing, and dressing himself on one leg, he was ready
for work. This consisted ofgoing over yesterday’s material, arguing over changes
and seeing how the new scenes fitted into the structure of the whole and affected
the scenes to come.
The wranglers’ daughters who served us our meals were frightened by our
shouting, but we enjoyed our collaboration. Once Mank had come to trust me,
my editing, for all our disagreements, gave him more creative freedom than his
own neurotic self-censor ship. We argued without competitiveness or embar¬
rassment till the middle of the afternoon. At that time Mank, who suffered great
pain from the knitting bones in his leg, would retire for his siesta while the sec¬
retary and I went over her notes on the day’s talk. At six Mankiewicz rose, ready
and eager for the great adventure of the day, when I would drive him and his
crutches to a railroad bar known as The Green Spot, where we slowly drank
one scotch apiece and watched the locals playing the pinball machines and danc¬
ing to the Western music of a jukebox. Once a week we visited the only movie,
then returned to The Green Spot for dinner. Other evenings we worked until
around ten, when I became sleepy from the mountain air. From my bed, through
the closed door, I could hear Mank’s voice as he continued his dictation, inter¬
rupted by games of cribbage which he had taught our devoted secretary.
We were not entirely incommunicado. Sarah drove up every other week to
satisfy herself that all was well, and seemed astounded to discover that it was.
Orson telephoned at odd hours to inquire after our progress. On the appointed
day, at the end of six weeks, he arrived in a limousine driven by Alfalfa, read a
hundred pages of script, listened to our outline of the rest, dined with us at The
Green Spot, thanked us and returned to Los Angeles. The next day he informed
462
Directors
the studio that he would start shooting early in July on a film which, at the time,
was entitled American.
The script grew harder to write as it went along. We had started with a clear,
objective outline of the Kane story—a linear record of the significant public and
private events in his life, from the cradle to the grave. In the screenplay these
events were briefly reviewed in the introductory March of Time, then revealed
through the testimony of successive witnesses delving into memories that were
shaped and colored by the bias of their own personal relations with Kane. Their
testimonies followed each other in vaguely chronological order; they also criss¬
crossed, overlapped, anticipated and bled into each other. This gave the film its
particular quality; it also created a structural problem that grew more serious
with each new day’s work. The richer and the more varied the sum of the tes¬
timonies became, the harder it got to keep them in manageable order. After each
testimony it became necessary to go back into the script and make changes to
conform to the new and sometimes seemingly contradictory events and situa¬
tions that had just been revealed. Since our witnesses frequently appeared in
scenes that took place before their own testimony began and stayed in the ac¬
tion long after their own story had ended, these multiple adjustments became
increasingly delicate and complicated as the script developed.
Finally, after ten weeks, we were done. Raymond, the butler, had spoken
his last snide word, and rosebud had been reduced to ashes in the incinerator
at Xanadu. The script was more than four hundred pages long—overrich, rep¬
etitious, loaded with irrelevant, fascinating detail and private jokes, of which we
loved every one. We spent two more weeks going through the pages with ma¬
chetes—hacking away, trimming, simplifying, clarifying its main dramatic lines
and yelling at each other all the time. Above all, we worked on the connective
tissue, substituting sharp cinematic cuts and visual transitions for what, in the
first version, had too often been leisurely verbal and literary expositions. And,
for the twentieth time, I reorganized the March of Time, which had become my
special domain, to conform to what now appeared to be significant facts in the
life of Charles Foster Kane.
Our peace was disturbed, during that last fortnight, by the news that was com¬
ing in night and day over the radio. The “phony war” was over: Hitler’s inva¬
sion of Belgium and France had begun. Mank could not bear to be away from
the half-dozen newspapers he was in the habit of reading each day. W e extended
our working hours. Then one evening, from The Green Spot, I called the stu¬
dio and ordered the limousine for the next day. Mank’s leg was almost healed,
but he clung to his invalid’s privileges. He lay alone, groaning, in the rear seat
of the limousine and I followed in the convertible as we made the reverse jour¬
ney through the Cajon Pass, down the steep curves of the San Bernardino Moun¬
tains, between the vineyards and orange groves of Azusa, through the slums of
Preston Sturges 463
Los Angeles to the RKO studio in Hollywood, where, before returning
Mankiewicz to Poor Sarah, we solemnly presented Orson with a screenplay
whose blue title page read:
AMERICAN
by
Herman Mankiewicz
Preston Sturges
Preston Sturges (1898—1959) blazed across Hollywood in the 1940s with one hit after
another: The Lady Eve, Palm Beach Story, Unfaithfully Yours, Sullivan’s Trav¬
els, and all the others, written and directed in a style that combined glitter, wit, and a
sharp, cynical intelligence. Then he lost his touch, partly because by the late 1940s he
was drinking too much, and although he lived on and made morefilms, he never regained
it. His youth was spent as a playboy and man-about-town, and in his glory years he liked
to make it appear that filmmaking was something he had stumbled into and did in his
spare time. Something of that tone is found here, along with his sardonic view of human
nature, in this account of his early days as a writer.
from Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges
In Hollywood I started at the bottom: a bum by the name of Sturgeon who had
once written a hit called Strictly Something-or-Other. Carl Laemmle of Universal
offered me a contract, with unilateral options exercisable by the studio, to join
his team as a writer. My wife had decamped, my fortune was depleted, and even
though I was living on coffee and moonlight, my costs of living continued to cost.
I did not have to wrestle with any principles to leap on Laemmle’s offer. On
September 9, 1932,! arrived in Hollywood with my secretary, Bianca Gilchrist.
464 Directors
I was to write, offer suggestions and make myself generally useful, and for
this I was to get a nominal or beginning writer’s salary of a thousand dollars a
week. Junior writers got less, of course, but I had written Strictly Something-or-
Other, and that made me a kind of senior beginner. I was charmed; it vindicated
my contention that writing was my profession, and the money proved it.
There were a great many writers on the lot, and the reason for this was that
at the time, writers worked in teams, like piano movers. It was generally be¬
lieved by the powers down in front that a man who could write comedy could
not write tragedy, that a man who could write forceful, virile stuff could not
handle the tender passages, and that if the picture was not to taste all of the same
cook, a multiplicity of writers was essential. Four writers were considered the
rock-bottom minimum required. Six writers, with the sixth member a woman
to puff up the lighter parts, was considered ideal. Many, many more writers have
been used on a picture, of course; several writers have even been assigned the
same story unbeknownst to each other. The Screen Writers Guild of the day
had even worked out some rather shameful rules governing the conduct and ap¬
proach of one writer toward another when he has secretly been given the other’s
job: he was not in honor bound to volunteer any information, but if asked di¬
rectly, he must not deny the sad truth.
A man in possession of many bolts of woolen cloth, quantities of lining and in¬
terlining, buttons, thread, needles, and padding is not, of necessity, a tailor. A
man in possession of many characters, many situations, many startling and dra¬
matic events, and many gags is not, of necessity, a storyteller.
The crafts of the tailor and the storyteller are not dissimilar, however, for
out of a mass of unrelated material, each contrives to fashion a complete and
well-balanced unit. Many stories are too heavy in the shoulders and too short in
the pants, with the design of the material running upside-down.
In constructing a talking-picture play, the basic story to be filmed passes
through many hands. Some writer turns out the first manuscript, which, being
the first, is condemned even before it is written.
Another writer is called in and the second treatment is made. The second
writer is no better than the first writer, but his treatment is vastly different, for
the simple reason that every single person in the world will tell the same story
differently: see the testimony of various bystanders at the scene of any street ac¬
cident.
A third writer is now engaged, on the grounds that three are better than one,
ignoring the rule that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Just as the fourth
writer is about to be engaged, with the fifth and sixth creeping over the hori¬
zon, word comes from the front office that shooting will begin three days hence.
The script, which is by now voluminous, is carried posthaste to a Funny Man,
Preston Sturges 465
who believes that only policemen are funny. In two strokes of a pencil, he
changes all the male characters to policemen, thus making the script funny.
The script, now funny, requires only a slight tightening up by a Construc¬
tion Expert in order to be in prime A1 condition. One glance is enough for this
expert to detect what is wrong: the end should come first, obviously; the mid¬
dle should come last; and the beginning should be thrown out. This is accom¬
plished in less time than it takes to tell about it, and the polished script is laid
on the desk of the production manager, who takes it home to peruse it. This
last, of course, is only a technicality, as the script must surely be right by now.
The production manager, who is not such a sap, returns to the office in the
morning, haggard, bulbous-eyed with worry. There seems to be something the
matter with the script. It is not that all the material is not there. The proper num¬
ber of smashed motorcars, the stupendous living rooms, the modernistic bed¬
rooms, the pompous matrons, the sterling workmen, and comic butlers, comic
Englishmen, all, all are there. But what in Nick’s name are they supposed to be
doing?
There is only one thing to be done, and the production manager does it. He
calls in another writer. There is no haggling over the fee because time is pre¬
cious. The story is disentangled and put in proper sequences again. That is to
say, it begins at the beginning and ends at the end, passing through the middle.
It is now ready for shooting, except for one or two technicalities. First, another
Funny Man takes a whack at it and changes the policemen to soldiers. Only one
more technicality to clear up and all will be set. Another Construction Expert
changes the beginning to the middle; the middle to the beginning; and, now that
the play is about soldiers, adds a good rousing battle scene to the end.
Zero hour being at hand, the screenplay is now given to the director, who
shoots the script as it stands, excepting only that the locale is changed to the Mid¬
dle Ages and the lovers meet on bicycles, achieving thus a very comical effect.
The customer walking home in his new suit is razzed by small boys as he
passes.
I thought I knew how to put a story together, but it might turn out that I was
meant to be a tailor.
Bianca and I were assigned beautiful offices in a little bungalow on the Uni¬
versal lot affectionately known as the Bull Pen. Its only inconvenience was its
location next to the gents’ room. All the other distinguished authors who in¬
habited the Bull Pen had to pass through my office to reach the facilities and on
the way out, they always dropped their paper towels on my desk. But at a thou¬
sand dollars a week, this was a small matter. I brushed off my desk and counted
my money.
I liked the people at the studio and made a lot of new friends. Within a month,
466 Directors
I was elected to membership in the Writers’ Club. In addition to quarters on
Sunset Boulevard housing a bar and a little food where the members could con¬
gregate at will, the club had regular Wednesday luncheon meetings of the
Corned Beef, Cabbage, and Culture Circle, which I much enjoyed. It was a club
for men only, of course, with invitations extended to the ladies on special oc¬
casions. Among the active members who became my friends were Rupert
Hughes, Doug Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Irving Thalberg, Ernst
Lubitsch, John Gilbert, and Will Rogers.
It took me exactly two days on the job as a hired writer, or until I met my
first director, to find out that I was in the wrong racket. I had expected my pro¬
ducer to be peculiar, of course, because the facts about Hollywood producers
had been well publicized throughout the land. On meeting him, I was not dis¬
appointed. About directors, though, I knew very little, and it took me a few min¬
utes to get the point.
It was not so much what the director said, it was the way he said it, especially
the way he looked at me (a writer): coolly, confidently, courteously, but with
a curious condescension, the way an Englishman looks at an American and an
American looks at an Indian. He was a perfectly polite and affable little man and
did his best to put me at my ease, but one of my knees kept twitching and I had
the uneasy feeling that instead of standing on my feet looking down at him, I
should have been on one knee looking up at him. The man was obviously a prince
of the blood.
The more directors I met, the more I realized that this was not an isolated
case. They were all princes of the blood. Nobody ever had them directing pic¬
tures in teams with one of them handling the horseback scenes and another han¬
dling the bedroom interludes: nobody ever put them in the Bull Pen or threw
paper towels on their desks. The bungalows they lived in on the lot had open
fireplaces and private bathrooms and big soft couches. Nobody ever assigned
them to pictures they didn’t like: they were timidly offered pictures. Sometimes
they graciously condescended to direct them, but if they said no, a story was a
piece of cheese, it was a piece of cheese.
This ennoblement, of course, had been conferred upon directors during the
silent days, when the directors truly were the storytellers and the princes of the
business. By the time I got to Hollywood, this aristocracy was merely a leftover
from an earlier day. The reasons for it were no longer apparent, like the rea¬
sons for so many other aristocracies. Years later when I became a writer-director,
actually the storyteller again, people said I was doing something new, but I was
not; I was doing something old.
As I had never written anything but comedies, my producer assigned me the
job of writing the ninth script of a horror picture: an adaptation of H. G. Wells’
book, The Invisible Man. Hardly any of Wells’ story was suited to a motion pic¬
ture, so it actually meant coming up with an original story. Eight well-known
Preston S t u rg e s
467
writers had already been paid for adaptations which the studio said could not be
used, and I thought that if mine were used, my future at Universal would be as¬
sured.
I hurried into the Bull Pen and came out ten weeks later with 180 pages of
stuff so chilling that it would cause the hair of a statue to stand on end and cold
sweat to stream down its sculptured back. The studio did not pick up its option
on my services and I was fired without further ceremony. The director said it
was a piece of cheese.
I had just been assigned a rewrite of a continuity for Slim Summerville and
ZaSu Pitts when my contract was up, but I stayed on at the studio to finish the
job and made them a present of a couple of weeks’ work. For this they pro¬
nounced themselves grateful, and my hope was that this bread cast upon the wa¬
ters would return as ham sandwiches.
Although off salary, I was not idle. Thoroughly displeased with the abysmal
status of a Hollywood team writer, I considered the benefits of free-lancing, writ¬
ing scripts on my own time and selling them to a studio later. I could then write
anywhere I liked, spend the spring in Paris, for instance, the summer on my boat,
the fall in New York and the winter in Palm Beach, coming to California for a
couple of days a year to sign contracts for the sale of the scripts.
Free-lancing to me was also a stab at raising the writer’s status, if not to the
level of prince of the blood, at least to the level of tender of the royal shaving
paper or something of equal dignity; anything to get out of the cellar to which
custom had assigned the Hollywood team writer.
Bianca got behind the typewriter and I got to work on The Power and the Glory,
a story inspired by some incidents Eleanor had told me about her mother’s fa¬
ther, C. W. Post, founder of the Postum Cereal Company, known today as the
General Foods Corporation. The fruits of inspiration bore no resemblance to
the actual life and times of Eleanor’s grandfather, of course, but I chose the
nonchronological structure of the screenplay because I noticed that when Eleanor
would recount adventures, the lack of chronology interfered not at all with one’s
pleasure in the stories and that, in fact, its absence often sharpened the impact
of the tale.
The screenplay for The Power and the Glory had one thing that distinguished it
from other scripts of the time. So far as I know, it was the first story conceived
and written directly as a shooting script by its author on his own time and then
sold to a moving picture company on a royalty basis, exactly as plays or novels
are sold. It established a couple of other “firsts,” too. It was the first script shot
by a director almost exactly as written. It was also the first story to use what the
publicity department dubbed narratage, that is, the narrator’s, or author’s, voice
spoke the dialogue while the actors only moved their lips. Strangely enough, this
was highly effective and the illusion was complete.
It was neither a silent film nor a talking film, but rather a combination of the
468 Directors
two. It embodied the visual action of a silent picture, the sound of the narra¬
tor’s voice, and the storytelling economy and the richness of characterization of
a novel.
The reason for trying this method was to see if some way could be devised
to carry American films into foreign countries. It would be extremely easy to
put a narrator’s voice on the sound track in any language, because the narrator
for the most part is heard, but not seen. The further advantage of a narrator is
that, like the author of a novel, he may describe not only what people do and
say but also what they feel and what they think.
I sold the screenplay to Jesse Lasky at Fox in February 1933 for a large down
payment and a percentage of the gross, cast it and directed the dialogue. Shoot¬
ing started in March.
At that time, very f ew successful writers had ever watched the whole process
of making a picture from beginning to end, including the rushes and the cutting,
because they were usually on salary and busy writing something else while their
last scripts were being filmed. I, however, was not a successful writer busy writ¬
ing something else and could do as I liked. I spent six weeks on the set, at my
own expense, helping to stage the dialogue and acting as sort of a general handy¬
man, what one might call speculative directing. The director, Mr. William K.
Howard, had a nice chair in front of the camera and a property man to take care
of his hat and coat. He told everybody what to do and, in general, he had a nice
time. Most of my time on the set was spent on top of a green stepladder in the
back, watching and learning. Occasionally I would hurry down the stepladder
to explain to Mr. Spencer Tracy or to Miss Colleen Moore what I meant by a
line and how I thought it should be read, then hurry back up the stepladder and
watch it being shot.
And there, on top of the green stepladder, watching Mr. William K. Howard
direct The Power and the Glory, I got a tremendous yen to direct, coupled with
the absolutely positive hunch that I could. I had never felt anything quite like it
before. Never while watching a heavyweight title match had I had the desire to
change places with one of the gentlemen in the ring. Nor at the six-day bicycle
races, while a fallen rider was picking splinters out of his rear, had I felt impelled
to swipe his vehicle and lap the field. Never at the fairgrounds did I envy the
man who dove into a barrel of feathers from atop a hundred-foot pole. I am not
an envious man. But from the top of the green stepladder, I ached to change
places with Mr. William K. Howard, who was doing such an excellent job
transferring my screenplay to film.
I did not wish Mr. Howard any hard luck like a bad automobile accident or
a seriously broken back or anything like that. I merely wished that some tem¬
porary fever would assail him, something not too harmful that would lay him
flat for the rest of the shooting schedule, so that the company would implore
Preston S t u r g e s
469
me, as the only other person thoroughly conversant with the script, to take over
the direction in his stead. I have seen that same hopeful look on the faces of my
young assistants, and it causes me to watch my step. I watched Mr. Howard with
glittering eyes as he nearly tripped over cables, nearly fell off high parallels and
sat in countless drafts, which I tested with a wet finger. He unfortunately re¬
mained disgustingly healthy, one of the prime requisites of a good director, and
I unfortunately remained a writer.
When the picture was released, I naturally received sole credit as the writer,
and found my name in the advertisements the same size as the director’s.
This, coupled with the deal I made selling the screenplay for large monies up
front and a percentage of the gross, made nothing but enemies for me. The di¬
rectors said, “Who is this bum getting his name the same size as ours?” The pro¬
ducers said, “This sets a very bad precedent: you give these upstarts an inch and
they’ll want their names up in lights!” The heads of the studios said, “What is
this rubbish about giving writers a percentage of the gross which shakes the very
foundations of the industry?” The trade press said, “What is this business of shoot¬
ing a picture by a single writer when we are accustomed to getting ads from six
or eight of them per picture?” And the writers, yea, even my brethren, viewed
with alarm the whittling down of jobs that would ensue if only one writer, God
forbid, worked on each script. I was as popular as a polecat and, with all that
money in the bank, as independent.
It is true that I was voted that year’s equivalent of an Academy Oscar for the
best original screenplay, but it is also true that I didn’t get any work for a long,
long time. So long that I had to go out and borrow.
Before I got to that stage though, I bought the hull of a seagoing schooner,
fifty-two foot overall, which gave me something to live for, filling my mind with
repairs and refittings and ropes and chains and teak and mahogany and brass fit¬
tings and diesel engines.
It was during this period that I decided to change my profession once more
and become a director instead of a team writer. It seemed easier for one man
to change his profession than for hundreds of men to so improve theirs that I
would be proud to be a screenwriter.
47 o
Directors
Woody Allen
It’s a peculiar thing about Woody Allen that although he has written more than twenty-
five movies and many plays and articles, he has apparently never written anything about
the movies. The closest he came was this fantasy about a stage production of Disney’s Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs. It is so clearly inspired by the Disney cartoon that I think
it qualifies for a movie anthology—particularly after Disney realized Woody’s fantasy
by converting Beauty and the Beast into a Broadway musical.
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”
Last night, the Lincoln Center theater opened the new season with the Elia Kazan
all-star production of Snow White, starring Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Anthony
Quinn, Jason Robards, Jr., Rod Steiger, George C. Scott and Sidney Poitier as
the seven dwarfs, with Kim Stanley as the queen and Mildred Dunnock in the
title role.
First, let me say that the show is the best Snow White ever done, including the
Gielgud production that played a limited run on Broadway some years back; and
while Sir Ralph Richardson’s Dopey was deemed a masterpiece of technical vir¬
tuosity at the time, Lee Cobb’s is infinitely more moving. But I will get to that.
I think what distinguishes this Snow White from any other is its success in com¬
ing to grips with issues. What is the meaning of life? Why does man feel alien¬
ated? And wherein lies his salvation? At the end of act two, Bashful kills himself
upon learning that his brother Sneezy has gone insane. He echoes the words of
the philosopher Nietzsche, who wrote, “God is dead. Everything is now possi¬
ble.” Coming from a shy dwarf, the impact is staggering. But on to the perfor¬
mances.
Rod Steiger has always been an actor of unusual sensitivity and, in Doc, he
Woo dy Allen
471
at last has a challenge equal to his abilities. Frustrated, alcoholic, impotent, Doc
is unable to “whistle while he works.” Haunted by the image of the surgeon he
could have become were he just a few feet taller, he is reduced to podiatry, a
branch of medicine he hates but which is within his grasp. “What he could never
understand,” Snow White sobs at one point, “is that there’s as much poetry in
a bunion as a ventricle. But how many of us realize that?”
Unable to stop sneezing, Robards’ Sneezy—the victim of a morbid neuro¬
sis—is racked with guilt over complicity with the Nazis during World War T wo.
Faced with a firing squad, he chose to inform on Happy, leader of the dwarf re¬
sistance, who, posing as a gnome, successfully harassed the Germans. Gnomes—
and Mr. Kazan makes a very telling point here—were highly instrumental in
sabotaging the German infantry by deepening their trenches as they slept, mak¬
ing it impossible for them to see over the tops. There is also some allusion to an
eighth dwarf, Weepy, who was executed by the Gestapo as a result of Sneezy’s
treason. And while other forest creatures have forgiven Sneezy, it is just this for¬
giveness that adds further torment to his guilty soul. Robards chooses to play
him with an objective, nonjudging quality that makes it all the more agonizing
when his mind rejects reality and, in a burst of vein-throbbing hysteria, he ac¬
cuses Grumpy of taking his porridge.
Anthony Quinn’s Bashful is electrifying and will probably be the definitive
Bashful for years to come. Shy, inarticulate, except for sudden explosions of rage,
Bashf ul finds solace in morphine, a habit he acquired years ago, as a result of ha v-
ing it prescribed for him to kill the pain after he had been run over by a beaver.
He finds now that life is unbearable without a drug of some kind and is forced
to steal twigs in an effort to support his addiction. His “connection,” a troll
(Fredric March), meets him beneath a bridge each night and, for a price, sup¬
plies him with the necessary fix. As his dependency grows, the troll increases
the price of morphine to several twigs. Bashful is forced to roll elves and when
he is caught shooting up behind a bunch of daffodils, he takes an overdose and
dies. He is laid to rest on a bed of leaves and throughout all the forest there is a
hush. His eulogy is brief but remarkably moving, considering it is delivered by
a frog (Pat Hingle).
In Cobb’s Dopey, we have the single greatest tragedy of the dwarfs. Dopey
has been a success in the past. Living in Hollywood and earning wealth and adu¬
lation as a film star who specialized in playing the hero’s wisecracking friend,
he delighted audiences of all ages with his deadpan whimsy. He is embittered
now because of a black-listing bef ore a vague and sinister group, referred to only
as “the committee,” that claims that all dwarfs are Communist inspired. Panicky
over threats of exposure, Dopey had gone before the committee and lied, claim¬
ing to be a midget. Destroyed as a perjurer, he finally returns to the forest and
marries a squirrel. Bewildered at life’s cruelties, he says movingly, “I, who once
47 2
Directors
had my pick of any bimbo in Hollywood, am now reduced to matrimony with
a furry rodent. Go figure.”
Yawning constantly as an expression of man’s boredom with an apparently
meaningless universe, Mr. Brando’s Sleepy reels and drifts into slumber again
and again, choosing to mount his tiny little bed with cap and nightgown, rather
than face the harsh realities of a crumbling existence. In a moment of true
poignancy, he turns to his brother Doc and says, “Y’lcnow, Doc—sometimes
when I’m alone in bed at night and everything’s pitch black, I have these thoughts.
Terrible thoughts. Like, I’m not really as cute and cuddly as I think I am. Oh,
sure, I’m tiny as could be and I got a little pointed hat. But I don’t know—I just
wish I was . . . more adorable.” Convinced that there is more to life than living
in the forest and gathering nectar and dewdrops, Sleepy runs away to the city
but returns, scorned and disillusioned. Here, Mr. Kazan tells us that all men have
their own private forests. For some it’s the office; others, the marriage bed or
analyst’s couch. I am certain that is his point. Either that or some men are
named Forest. This is the one section of the play that becomes obscure, although
the audience seemed to love it.
Sidney Poitier’s Happy is a study in racial tension so agonizingly real yet re¬
strained that it recalls the unadorned brilliance of Paul Robeson’s Jiminy Cricket
some seasons back. Poitier has extracted every last drop of emotion from Happy
and the scene in which Snow White rejects him, “not because you are a Negro
but because I could never love a man whose head came up to my kneecap,” is
unbearably moving. Happy cannot believe he is being turned down for any rea¬
son other than the color of his skin, a misconception that infuriates him. In an
effort to elicit a human response from anyone, he talks increasingly of suicide
and then threatens to throw himself off the stump of a tree. Snow White pleads
with him to reconsider, but it is too late. He jumps. Instead of dying, he lands
on a tulip and is crippled for life.
Despite the virtuoso performance of George C. Scott, and there can be no
doubt that he is one of the great American actors, this reviewer felt he missed
the point of Grumpy entirely. Grumpy is psychotic when the play begins. He is
fiercely anti-Semitic and feels the forest is assuming an ever-increasing “Jewish
essence,” which he deplores. There is an incident where several chipmunks are
storing nuts in their cheeks. This tends to give them what Grumpy feels is a “Ha¬
sidic look.” It leads to quarreling and finally, to Grumpy’s master plan to re¬
strict the forest to pure-blooded Aryan types: tall, blond, blue-eyed. This is in
direct conflict with the fact that he himself has Jewish blood. (His mother, we
learn, was seduced by a water sprite named Ben Fleagel, who promised her stock¬
ings.) Grumpy becomes more and more schizophrenic as he speaks of the final
solution of the Jewish problem while studying the Torah. He is taken away to a
dwarf asylum and given shock therapy with a joy buzzer.
John Huston
47 3
Finally, Mildred Dunnock plays the frigid Snow White with a brooding in¬
tensity and Kim Stanley is broadly hilarious as the wicked queen. Credit must
also be given to the prince (Christopher Plummer) who awakens Snow White
with a kiss and, with nothing more than a raised eyebrow, makes his part into
a delightful cameo. The sets by Jo Mielziner are ingenious. I particularly like the
clever way in which he has made the forest on a bright spring morning look like
Auschwitz. Mr. Kazan has directed the entire production with a gossamer touch.
One last note on a brilliant “inside” bit of stage business: Although he is not cred¬
ited in the program, the voice of the mirror in the “Mirror, mirror on the wall”
sequence is unmistakably Walter Winchell’s.
John Huston
John Huston (1906—1987) titled his autobiography An Open Book, but it was closed
for all it reveals about the man himself. That’s consistent with the impression I got dur¬
ing several meetings with him: He spoke with great courtesy and attentiveness, agreeing
with almost everything one said, elaborating, embroidering, choosing his words with a
certain ornatejormality, yet when the conversation was over, it was diff icult to determine
what he had actually said. I think it was a verbal strategy for keeping the world at arm’s
length; revelations were reserved for his friends and lovers. The book too is at arm’s length:
a record but not a confessional. Only when he talks about his craft, as he does here in a
discussion tfhis style, do you feel he is really leveling with you.
from An Open Book
I’m not aware of myself as a director having a style. I’m told that I do, but I don’t
recognize it. I see no remote similarity, for example, between The Red Badge of
Courage and Moulin Rouge. However observant the critic, I don’t think he’d be
able to tell that the same director made them both. Bergman has a style that’s
474
Directors
unmistakably his. He is a prime example of the auteur approach to making pic¬
tures. I suppose it is the best approach: the director conceives the idea, writes
it, puts it on film. Because he is creating out of himself, controlling all aspects
of the work, his films assume a unity and a direction. I admire directors like
Bergman, Fellini, Bunuel, whose every picture is in some way connected with
their private lives, but that’s never been my approach. I’m eclectic. I like to draw
on sources other than myself; further, I don’t think of myself as simply, uniquely
and forever a director of motion pictures. It is something for which I have a cer¬
tain talent, and a profession the disciplines of which I have mastered over the
years, but I also have a certain talent for other things, and I have worked at those
disciplines as well. The idea of devoting myself to a single pursuit in life is un¬
thinkable to me. My interests in boxing, writing, painting, horses have at cer¬
tain periods in my life been every bit as important as that in directing films.
I have been speaking of style, but before there can be style, there must be
grammar. There is, in fact, a grammar to picture-making. The laws are as in¬
exorable as they are in language, and are to be found in the shots themselves.
When do we fade-in or fade-out with a camera? When do we dissolve, pan, dolly,
cut? The rules governing these techniques are well grounded. They must, of
course, be disavowed and disobeyed from time to time, but one must be aware
of their existence, for motion pictures have a great deal in common with our
own physiological and psychological processes—more so than any other
medium. It is almost as if there were a reel of film behind our eyes ... as though
our very thoughts were projected onto the screen.
Motion pictures, however, are governed by a time sense different from that
of real life; different from the theater, too. That rectangle of light up there with
the shadows on it demands one’s whole attention. And what it furnishes must sat¬
isfy that demand. When we are sitting in a room in a house, there is no single
claim on our awareness. Our attention jumps from object to object, drifts in
and out of the room. We listen to sounds coming from various points; we may
even smell something cooking. In a motion-picture theater, where our undivided
attention is given to the screen, time actually moves more slowly, and action
has to be speeded up. Furthermore, whatever action takes place on that screen
must not violate our sense of the appropriate. We accomplish this by adhering
to the proper grammar of film-making.
For example, a fade-in or a fade-out is akin to waking up or going to sleep.
The dissolve indicates either a lapse of time or a change of place. Or it can, in
certain instances, indicate that things in different places are happening at the same
time. In any case, the images impinge . . . the way dreams proceed, or like the
faces you can see when you close your eyes. When we pan, the camera turns
from right to left, or vice versa, and serves one of two purposes: it follows an
individual, or it informs the viewer of the geography of the scene. Y ou pan from
John Huston
MS
one object to another in order to establish their spatial relationship; thereafter
you cut. We are forever cutting in real life. Look from one object to another
across the room. Notice how you involuntarily blink. That’s a cut. You know
what the spatial relationship is, there’s nothing to discover about the geogra¬
phy, so you cut with your eyelids. The dolly is when the camera doesn’t simply
turn on its axis but moves horizontally or backward and forward. It may move
closer to intensify interest and pull away to come to a tableau, thereby putting
a finish—or a period—to a scene. A more common purpose is simply to include
another figure in the frame.
The camera usually identifies itself with one of the actors in a scene, and it
sees the others through his eyes. The nature of the scene determines how close
the actors are to each other. If it’s an intimate scene, obviously you don’t show
the other individual as a full-length figure. The image on the screen should cor¬
respond to what we experience in real life. Seated a few feet apart, the upper
body of one or the other would fill the screen. Inches apart would be a big-head
close-up. The size of their images must be in accordance with the proper spa¬
tial relationship. Unless there’s a reason: when actors are some distance apart
and the effect of what one is saying has a significant impact upon the person he’s
talking to, you might go into a close-up of the listener. But still his distance, as
he views the person who is speaking, must remain the same. Going into a big-
head close-up with dialogue that is neither intimate nor significant serves only
to over-emphasize the physiognomy of the actor.
Usually the camera is in one of two positions: “standing up” or “sitting down.”
When we vary this, it should be to serve a purpose. Shooting up at an individ¬
ual ennobles him. As children we looked up to our parents, or we look up at a
monumental sculpture. On the other hand, when we look down, it’s at some¬
one weaker than we are, someone to laugh at, pity or feel superior to. As the
camera goes higher and higher looking downward, it becomes God-like.
The conventional film-maker usually shoots a scene in full shot—a master
scene—followed by medium shots, close shots and close-ups ... at various an¬
gles . . . then decides in the cutting room what to use. The opposite way is to
find the one shot that serves as an introduction to a scene; the rest will follow
naturally. Again there’s a grammar to it. Once you write your first declarative
sentence, the narration flows. Understanding the syntax of a scene implies that
you already know the way the scene will be cut together, so you shoot only
what’s required. That’s called “cutting with the camera.”
I work closely with the cameraman and with the operator, the man who ac¬
tually manipulates the camera. He looks through the lens, executing what you’ve
specified. At the end of a shot you look to him to see if he’s brought it off. The
camera is sometimes required to take part in a sort of a dance with the artists,
and its movements timed as if they were to music, and I’ve noticed that most
476 Directors
good operators have a natural sense of rhythm. They usually dance well, play
drums, juggle or do something that requires good timing and balance.
Cameramen—most of them ex-operators—are really lighting experts. They
like to be known not as cameramen but as directors of lighting. Young direc¬
tors are, as a rule, somewhat frightened of their cameramen. This is under¬
standable, for cameramen often proceed in an independent fashion to light each
scene precisely as they please. Lighting is their first interest, since other cam¬
eramen will judge them by it.
As an actor, it’s been my opportunity to observe the working methods of
other directors. For the most part, they go by the book. Inexperienced direc¬
tors put great stock in the master scene—which is shot as though all the actors
were on a stage; you see everybody at once, and all the action. Their idea is that
if they’ve missed something in the closer work with the camera that they should
see, they can always fall back to the master shot. They think of it as a way of
protecting themselves. I’ve often heard cameramen advise such a procedure, but
a cameraman is not a cutter. The tact that falling back to the master scene in¬
terrupts the flow of the whole scene and breaks whatever spell has been evoked
through good close-up work is of no concern to him. Obviously I am not speak¬
ing about all cameramen. There are any number of outstanding professionals who
are just as concerned with getting that ideal sequence of shots—whatever the
cost—as any director.
So many things can go wrong while filming a scene. If only everything bad
that’s going to happen would happen at once and be over with! You’re seldom
that fortunate. Instead, it’s the camera, or an actor forgetting his lines, or the
sound of an airplane, or a car backfiring, or an arc light that flickers. When things
of this kind occur, you simply have to start again. It can drive a director up the
wall. I recall an incident involving one especially volatile director who was mak¬
ing a film in Africa. During one take a native baby began crying, and that stopped
the scene. He started over, and a lion began roaring when it wasn’t supposed
to. The director shouted: “Cut! I can see that there’s only one way to get this
God-damned scene! Throw the fucking baby to the fucking lion!”
Now, if you can make use oftwo or even three set-ups—going from one bal¬
anced, framed picture to another without cutting—a sense of richness, grace
and fluency is evoked. For example, one set-up might be a long shot of a wagon
train moving slowly across the screen. The camera moves with it and comes to
two men standing together, talking. Then one of the men walks toward the cam¬
era, and the camera pulls back to the point where he encounters a third indi¬
vidual, who stands back to the camera until the other man has passed on out of
the scene. Then he turns and looks after him, in close-up. Three complete set¬
ups—without cutting. Of course, the set-ups must be carefully laid out and per¬
fectly framed, and this multiplies the chances of something going wrong. But
John Huston
Ml
I’ve discovered that, even with the increased possibility of error, the time spent
is not much more than would be spent on three separate set-ups.
Such linked shots are the mark of a good director. The scenes I have put to¬
gether in this fashion have scarcely—if ever—been remarked on by an audience
or a critic. But the fact that they have gone unnoticed is, in a sense, the best praise
they could receive. They are so natural that the audience is caught up in the flow.
This is the exact opposite of the kind of thing people tend to think of as clever—
somebody’s distorted reflection in a doorknob, for instance, a stunt that distracts
one’s attention from the scene. It is important to say things on the screen with
ingenuity, but never to belabor the audience with images that say, “Look at this!”
The work of the camera with the actors, as I mentioned before, often amounts
to a dance—panning, dollying, following the movement of the actors with
grace, not cutting. There’s a choreography to it. Not many picture-makers are
up to this. I’d say a dozen or so.
It is best to shoot chronologically. In this way you can benefit by accidents,
and you don’t paint yourself into corners. However, if the picture begins in India
and ends in India, with other countries in between, it is economically imprac¬
tical not to shoot all the Indian material at one time. When you are on a distant
location, you do everything that calls for that location. That is a compromise,
but making a picture is a series of compromises. It is when you feel that the com¬
promise will affect—or risks affecting—the overall quality of the picture that
you must decide whether or not to go along with it.
Plain, ordinary judgment plays a big part. For instance, you may well get what
seems to be the ideal scene on your first take. Then you must question whether
you have been sufficiently critical. Is the scene truly as good as you first thought?
Inexperienced directors are inclined to shoot almost every scene at least twice,
in the fear that something may have escaped them. They may be blessed and not
realize it—and, in trying to improve upon something that doesn’t need im¬
proving, may run into these technical problems that I mentioned earlier. If the
action is right and the artists have been everything you desire, then a second take
will do you no good. If something is wrong with the film or the lighting, it will
be wrong on the second or third take, too, so that’s no kind of insurance. A di¬
rector has to leam to trust his judgment.
Each time you get a good scene is a kind of miracle. Usually there is some¬
thing wrong, however slight, and you must consider the importance of the
error. As you repeat a scene, your demands in terms of quality tend to increase
proportionately. You’ve got to watch this, and not become a fanatic.
I’ve come onto sets where a director has prepared all the lighting and desig¬
nated all the action before bringing in any of the performers. In some cases it
was an inexperienced director following the advice of his cameraman—in oth¬
ers, a matter of such a tight schedule that every second counted. But simply to
478 Directors
light a set and say, “Now you sit here. You stand there,” without any prelimi¬
naries, is only to embalm the scene: The actors are put into strait-jackets. The
best way, the only way, is to search out that first shot—that first declarative sen¬
tence which I mentioned earlier—and the rest will follow naturally. It’s not easy
to come by, especially when there are a number of people in the scene .But until
you get that shot you’re at sea. The answer is not simply to pull back for a full
shot. Instead, look for something that has style and visual energy, something in
keeping with your ideas for the picture as a whole. You have the actors go
through their paces and you still don’t see it. Now, don’t panic. Don’t worry
about what the actors and the crew may think (that the director doesn’t know
whatthe hell he’s doing!). This anxiety may force you into something false. And
if you get off to a false start, there’s no correcting it. Given time and freedom,
the actors will fall naturally into their places, discover when and where to move,
and you will have your shot. And given all those shots, cut together, you will
have your microcosm: the past on the winding reel; the present on the screen;
the future on the unwinding reel. . . inevitable . . . unless the power goes off.
These observations are seldom remarked upon by picture-makers. They are
so true, I suppose, that they are simply accepted without question as conven¬
tions. But they are conventions that have meaning—even for mavericks.
Jean FIenoir.
No one except Orson Welles has ever scored higher than Jean Renoir (1894—19J9) in
Sight & Sound’s ten-yearly polls of the world’s greatestfilms. Usually two are mentioned:
The Rules of the Game and The Grand Illusion. Renoir was a sunny man, somehow
r fleeting the jolly view of life that his father’s paintings reflected, and in his last decades
he lived in Southern California, where after directing his lastfilm, he lived on as a friend,
adviser, confidant, and wit, makingfriends of everyone he met. Here he discusses the gen¬
esis of La Regie du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), which remains one of the glories of
the cinema.
Jean Renoir
479
from My Life and My Films
You spend an evening listening to records and the result is a film. I cannot say
that it was French baroque music that inspired me to make La Regie du Jeu, but
certainly it played a part in making me wish to film the sort of people who danced
to that music. I based my thought on it only at the beginning. It does not ac¬
company the film except generically. I was entering a period of my life when
my daily companions were Couperin, Rameau and every composer from Lulli
to Gretry. By degrees my idea took shape and the subject became simplified,
and after a few days, while I lived to baroque rhythms, it became more and more
clearly defined.
I thought of certain of my friends whose amorous intrigues seemed to be their
only object in life. As Lestringuez said: “If you want to write the truth you must
get it well into your head that the world is one large knocking-shop. Men only
think of one thing, and that is laying women; and the ones who think of any¬
thing else are played out—drowned in the muddy waters of sentimentality.”
Lestringuez was, of course, speaking for himself, but his words impressed me
and I decided to transpose the characters, enacting that hitherto non-existent
theme into our own period. Then I began to see the outline of the story, but
not to the point where I had decided on any definite style.
I needed a background: it was the Sologne which provided me with the set¬
ting in which the actors were to discover the truth about the characters they were
playing. Its mists took me back to the happy days of my childhood when Gabrielle
and I went to the Theatre Montmartre to be enthralled by Jack Sheppard, ou les
Chevaliers du Brouillard. Nothing is more mysterious than a countryside emerg¬
ing from fog. In that cotton-wool atmosphere the sound of gunshots is deadened.
It is a perfect setting for a tale by Andersen. One expects to see will-o’-the-wisps
emerging from every pool, or even the King of the Marshes himself. The Sologne
is a region of marshes entirely devoted to hunting, a sport which I detest. I con¬
sider it an abominable exercise in cruelty. By situating my story amid those
vapours I gave myself the chance to depict a shooting-party. These various ele¬
ments crowded through my mind, compelling me to find a story in which they
could be used.
My first idea was to produce an up-to-date version of Les Caprices de Marianne.
This is the tale of a tragic misunderstanding: Marianne’s lover is mistaken for
someone else and killed in an ambush. I need not go into details; I introduced
so much else into it that the story itself was reduced to a thread. An important
element is the emotional honesty of Christine, the heroine. Since the authors of
films and books are generally men, they tell stories about men. I like to describe
480
Directors
women. Another important element is the purity of Jurieu, the victim, who,
trying to fit into a world to which he does not belong, fails to respect the rules
of the game. During the shooting of the film I was torn between my desire to
make a comedy of it and the wish to tell a tragic story. The result of this am¬
bivalence was the film as it is. I had moments of profound discouragement; but
then, when I saw the way the actors were interpreting my ideas, I became wildly
enthusiastic. My uncertainties are apparent in the development of the story and
the acting of its protagonists. I recall the hesitations of Christine. The part was
played by Nora Gregor, who was none other than Princess Stahremberg. Her
husband, Prince Stahremberg, was an Austrian landowner who had founded an
anti-Hitler peasant party. In his own domain the peasants voted for him, but the
wave of Hitlerism was to sweep them aside.
I had got to know him shortly before La Regie du Jeu. He and his wife were in
a state of great disarray. Everything they believed in was collapsing. One could
write a novel about the state of mind of those exiles. But I was content to use
the appearance of Nora Gregor, her look of “birdlike” sincerity, to shape the char¬
acter of Christine. Once again I started from externals to arrive at the creation
of a character or a plot. I must ask forgiveness f or dwelling upon this point, but,
having reached the time of life when I must face the fact that I shall make no
more films, I am more than ever attached to that principle. One starts with the
environment to arrive at the self. I respect and admire artists who proceed in
the opposite direction. Abstract art corresponds to the necessities of our time.
But personally I remain a man of the nineteenth-century and I need observation
as a point of departure. My father, who mistrusted imagination, said: “If you paint
the leaf on a tree without using a model you risk becoming stereotyped, because
your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves whereas Nature offers
you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist
who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself.”
One does not really know what a film is until it has been edited. The first
showings of La Regie du Jeu filled me with misgiving. It is a war film, and yet
there is no reference to the war. Beneath its seemingly innocuous appearance
the story attacks the very structure of our society. Yet all I thought about at the
beginning was nothing avant-garde but a good little orthodox film. People go
to the cinema in the hope of forgetting their everyday problems, and it was pre¬
cisely their own worries that I plunged them into. The imminence of war made
them even more thin-skinned. I depicted pleasant, sympathetic characters, but
showed them in a society in process of disintegration, so that they were defeated
at the outset, like Stahremberg and his peasants. The audience recognized this.
The truth is that they recognized themselves. People who commit suicide do
not care to do it in front of witnesses.
I was utterly dumbfounded when it became apparent that the film, which I
Akira Kurosawa
48 1
wanted to be a pleasant one, rubbed most people up the wrong way. It was a
resounding flop, to which the reaction was a kind of loathing. Despite a few
favourable notices, the public as a whole regarded it as a personal insult. There
was no question of contrivance; my enemies had nothing to do with its failure.
At every session I attended I could feel the unanimous disapproval of the audi¬
ence. I tried to save the film by shortening it, and to start with I cut the scenes
in which I myself played too large a part, as though I were ashamed, after this
rebuff, of showing myself on the screen. But it was useless. The film was
dropped, having been judged to be “too demoralizing.”
Many explanations of this attitude have been propounded. For my own part,
I think the audience’s reaction was due to my candour. The film had been shaped
in response to influences in my personal life, the most powerful being those of
my childhood. But that part of my life had been lived with my parents and
Gabrielle, people incapable of not perceiving the truth behind the mask. To use
a word that crops up frequently in the modem vocabulary, life with my family
had been a “de-mystification.” We are all “mystified”—that is to say, fooled,
duped, treated as of no account. I had the good fortune to have been taught to
see through the trickery in my youth. In La Regie duJeu, I passed on what I knew
to the public. But this is something that people do not like; the truth makes them
feel uncomfortable. A quarter of a century later I gave a lecture at Harvard Uni¬
versity. La Regie du Jeu was showing at a nearby cinema. There was a burst of
cheering when I appeared on the platform. The students were applauding the
film. Since then its reputation has steadily grown. What seemed an insult to so¬
ciety in 1939 has become clear-sightedness.
But the fact remains that the failure of La Regie du Jeu so depressed me that I
resolved either to give up the cinema or to leave France.
Akifia Kurosawa
if the Japanese thought Ozu’sfilms were too Japanese to travel to the West, they had the
opposite problem with Akira Kurosawa: He was often criticizedfor makingfilms that were
too Western, with non-Japanese music on the sound track and stories that might as of ten
have originated with Shakespeare, Maxim Gorky, or Ed McBain as with a Japanese au-
482
Di rectors
thor. Yet Kurosawa was responsiblejor creating images ofmedieval Japan that have since
been refected in countless otherfilms and TV programs. Consider Seven Samurai, Yo-
jimbo, The Hidden Fortress— or his masterpiece Rashomon, which he writes about
here in his autobiography.
from Something Like an Autobiography
During that time the gate was growing larger and larger in my mind ’ s eye. I was
location-scouting in the ancient capital of Kyoto for Rashomon, my eleventh-
century period film. The Daiei management was not very happy with the pro¬
ject. They said the content was difficult and the title had no appeal. They were
reluctant to let the shooting begin. Day by day, as I waited, I walked around
Kyoto and the still more ancient capital of Nara a few miles away, studying the
classical architecture. The more I saw, the larger the image of the Rashomon
gate became in my mind.
At first I thought my gate should be about the size of the entrance gate to Toji
Temple in Kyoto. Then it became as large as the Tengaimon gate in Nara, and
finally as big as the main two-story gates of the Ninnaji and Todaiji temples in
Nara. This image enlargement occurred not just because I had the opportunity
to see real gates dating from that period, but because of what I was learning,
from documents and relics, about the long-since-destroyed Rashomon gate it¬
self.
“Rashomon” actually refers to the Rajomon gate; the name was changed in a
Noh play written by Kanze Nobumitsu. “Rajo” indicates the outer precincts of
the castle, so “Rajomon” means the main gate to the castle’s outer grounds. The
gate for my film Rashomon was the main gate to the outer precincts of the
ancient capital—Kyoto was at that time called “Heian-Kyo.” If one entered
the capital through the Rajomon gate and continued due north along the main
thoroughfare of the metropolis, one came to the Shujakumon gate at the end of
it, and the Toji and Saiji temples to the east and west, respectively. Consider¬
ing this city plan, it would have been strange had the outer main gate not been
the biggest gate of all. There is tangible evidence that it in fact was: The blue
roof tiles that survive from the original Rajomon gate show that it was large.
But, no matter how much research we did, we couldn’t discover the actual di¬
mensions of the vanished structure.
As a result, we had to construct the Rashomon gate to the city based on what
we could leam from looking at extant temple gates, knowing that the original
was probably different. What we built as a set was gigantic. It was so immense
that a complete roof would have buckled the support pillars. Using the artistic
Akira Kurosawa
483
device of dilapidation as an excuse, we constructed only half a roof and were
able to get away with our measurements. To be historically accurate, the im¬
perial palace and the Shujakumon gate should have been visible looking north
through our gate. But on the Daiei back lot such distances were out of the ques¬
tion, and even if we had been able to find the space, the budget would have made
it impossible. We made do with a cut-out mountain to be seen through the gate.
Even so, what we built was extraordinarily large for an open set.
When I took this project to Daiei, I told them the only sets I would need were
the gate and the tribunal courtyard wall where all the survivors, participants and
witnesses of the rape and murder that form the story of the film are questioned.
Everything else, I promised them, would be shot on location. Based on this low-
budget set estimate, Daiei happily took on the project.
Later Kawaguchi Matsutaro, at that time a Daiei executive, complained that
they had really been fed a line. To be sure, only the gate set had to be built, but
for the price of that one mammoth set they could have had over a hundred or¬
dinary sets. But, to tell the truth, I hadn’t intended so big a set to begin with.
It was while I was kept waiting all that time that my research deepened and my
image of the gate swelled to its startling proportions.
When I had finished Scandal for the Shochiku studios, Daiei asked if 1 wouldn’t
direct one more film for them. As I cast about for what to film, I suddenly re¬
membered a script based on the short story “Yabu no naka” (“In a Grove”) by
Akutagawa Ryunosuke. It had been written by Hashimoto Shinobu, who had
been studying under director Itami Mansaku. It was a very well-written piece,
but not long enough to make into a feature film. This Hashimoto had visited my
home, and I talked with him for hours. He seemed to have substance, and I took
a liking to him. He later wrote the screenplays for Ikiru (1952) and Shichinin no
samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954) with me. The script I remembered was his Aku¬
tagawa adaptation called “Male-Female.”
Probably my subconscious told me it was not right to have put that script
aside; probably I was—without being aware of it—wondering all the while if I
couldn’t do something with it. At that moment the memory of it jumped out
of one of those creases in my brain and told me to give it a chance. At the same
time I recalled that “In a Grove” is made up of three stories, and realized that if
I added one more, the whole would be just the right length for a feature film.
Then I remembered the Akutagawa story “Rashomon.” Like “In a Grove,” it was
set in the Heian period (794— 1184). The film Rashomon took shape in my mind.
Since the advent ofthe talkies in the 1930’s, I felt, we had misplaced and for¬
gotten what was so wonderful about the old silent movies. I was aware of the
esthetic loss as a constant irritation. I sensed a need to go back to the origins of
the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again; I had to go back into the
past.
In particular, I believed that there was something to be learned from the spirit
484 Directors
of the French avant-garde films of the 1920’s. Yet in Japan at this time we had
no film library. I had to forage for old films, and try to remember the structure
of those I had seen as a boy, ruminating over the esthetics that had made them
special.
Kashomon would be my testing ground, the place where I could apply the ideas
and wishes growing out of my silent-film research. To provide the symbolic back¬
ground atmosphere, I decided to use the Akutagawa “In a Grove” story, which
goes into the depths of the human heart as if with a surgeon’s scalpel, laying bare
its dark complexities and bizarre twists. These strange impulses of the human
heart would be expressed through the use of an elaborately fashioned play of light
and shadow. In the film, people going astray in the thicket of their hearts would
wander into a wider wilderness, so I moved the setting to a large forest. I se¬
lected the virgin forest of the mountains surrounding Nara, and the forest be¬
longing to the Komyoji temple outside Kyoto.
There were only eight characters, but the story was both complex and deep.
The script was done as straightforwardly and briefly as possible, so I felt I should
be able to create a rich and expansive visual image in turning it into a film.
Fortunately, I had as cinematographer a man I had long wanted to work with,
Miyagawa Kazuo; I had Flayasaka to compose the music and Matsuyama as art
director. The cast was Mifune Toshiro, Mori Masayuki, KyoMachiko, Shimura
Takashi, Chiaki Minoru, Ueda Kichijiro, KatoDaisuke and Flonma Fumiko; all
were actors whose temperaments I knew, and I could not have wished for a bet¬
ter line-up. Moreover, the story was supposed to take place in summer, and we
had, ready to hand, the scintillating midsummer heat of Kyoto and Nara. With
all these conditions so neatly met, I could ask nothing more. All that was left
was to begin the film.
Flowever, one day just before the shooting was to start, the three assistant
directors Daiei had assigned me came to see me at the inn where I was staying.
I wondered what the problem could be. It turned out that they found the script
baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. “Please read it again more care¬
fully,” I told them. “If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand
it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.” But they
wouldn’t leave. “We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t un¬
derstand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.” For their persis¬
tence I gave them this simple explanation:
Fluman beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves.
They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays
such human beings—the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them
feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need
for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave—even the character who dies
cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism
Akira Kurosawa
4 8 5
is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to
redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed
by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is be¬
cause the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the im¬
possibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more
time, I think you will grasp the point of it.
After I finished, two of the three assistant directors nodded and said they
would try reading the script again. They got up to leave, but the third, who was
the chief, remained unconvinced. He left with an angry look on his face. (As it
turned out, this chief assistant director and I never did get along. I still regret
that in the end I had to ask for his resignation. But, aside from this, the work
went well.)
During the rehearsals before the shooting I was left virtually speechless by
Kyo Machiko’s dedication. She came in to where I was still sleeping in the morn¬
ing and sat down with the script in her hand. “Please teach me what to do,” she
requested, and I lay there amazed. The other actors, too, were all in their
prime. Their spirit and enthusiasm was obvious in their work, and equally man¬
ifest in their eating and drinking habits.
They invented a dish called Sanzoku-yaki, or “Mountain Bandit Broil,” and
ate it frequently. It consisted of beef strips sauteed in oil and then dipped in a
sauce made of curry powder in melted butter. But while they held their chop¬
sticks in one hand, in the other they’d hold a raw onion. From time to time they’d
put a strip of meat on the onion and take a bite out of it. Thoroughly barbaric.
The shooting began at the Nara virgin forest. This forest was infested with
mountain leeches. They dropped out of the trees onto us, they crawled up our
legs from the ground to suck our blood. Even when they had had their fill, it
was no easy task to pull them off, and once you managed to rip a glutted leech
out of your flesh, the open sore seemed never to stop bleeding. Our solution
was to put a tub of salt in the entry of the inn. Before we left for the location in
the morning we would cover our necks, arms and socks with salt. Leeches are
like slugs—they avoid salt.
In those days the virgin forest around Nara harbored great numbers of mas¬
sive cryptomerias and Japanese cypresses, and vines of lush ivy twined from tree
to tree like pythons. It had the air of the deepest mountains and hidden glens.
Every day I walked in this forest, partly to scout for shooting locations and partly
for pleasure. Once a black shadow suddenly darted in front of me: a deer from
the Nara park that had returned to the wild. Looking up, I saw a pack of mon¬
keys in the big trees above my head.
The inn we were housed in lay at the foot of Mount Wakakusa. Once a big
monkey who seemed to be the leader of the pack came and sat on the roof of
the inn to stare at us studiously throughout our boisterous evening meal. An-
486 Directors
other time the moon rose from behind Mount Wakakusa, and for an instant we
saw the silhouette of a deer framed distinctly against its full brightness. Often
after supper we climbed up Mount Wakakusa and formed a circle to dance in
the moonlight. I was still young and the cast members were even younger and
bursting with energy. We carried out our work with enthusiasm.
When the location moved from the Nara Mountains to the Komyoji temple
forest in Kyoto, it was Gion Festival time. The sultry summer sun hit with full
force, but even though some members of my crew succumbed to heat stroke,
our work pace never flagged. Every afternoon we pushed through without even
stopping for a single swallow of water. When work was over, on the way back
to the inn we stopped at a beer hall in Kyoto’s downtown Shijo-Kawaramachi
district. There each of us downed about four of the biggest mugs of draft beer
they had. But we ate dinner without any alcohol and, upon finishing, split up to
go about our private affairs. Then at ten o’clock we’d gather again and pour
whiskey down our throats with a vengeance. Every morning we were up bright
and clear-headed to do our sweat-drenched work.
Where the Komyoji temple forest was too thick to give us the light we
needed for shooting, we cut down trees without a moment’s hesitation or ex¬
planation. The abbot of Komyoji glared fearfully as he watched us. But as the
days went on, he began to take the initiative, showing us where he thought trees
should be felled.
When our shoot was finished at the Komyoji location, I went to pay my re¬
spects to the abbot. He looked at me with grave seriousness and spoke with deep
feeling. “To be honest with you, at the outset we were very disturbed when you
went about cutting down the temple trees as if they belonged to you. But in the
end we were won over by your wholehearted enthusiasm. ‘Show the audience
something good.’ This was the focus of all your energies, and you forgot your¬
selves. Until I had the chance to watch you, I had no idea that the making of a
movie was a crystallization of such effort. I was very deeply impressed.”
The abbot finished and set a folding fan before me. In commemoration of our
filming, he had written on the fan three characters forming a Chinese poem:
“Benefit All Mankind.” I was left speechless.
We set up a parallel schedule for the use of the Komyoji location and open
set of the Rashomon gate. On sunny days we filmed at Komyoji; on cloudy days
we filmed the rain scenes at the gate set. Because the gate set was so huge, the
job of creating rainfall on it was a major operation. We borrowed fire engines
and turned on the studio’s fire hoses to full capacity. But when the camera was
aimed upward at the cloudy sky over the gate, the sprinkle of the rain couldn’t
b e seen against i t, s o w e made rainfall with black ink o n i t. Every day we worked
in temperatures of more than 8 Fahrenheit, but when the wind blew through
the wide-open gate with the terrific rainf all pouring down over it, it was enough
to chill the skin.
Akira Kurosawa
487
I had to be sure that this huge gate looked huge to the camera. And I had to
figure out how to use the sun itself. This was a major concern because of the de¬
cision to use the lightand shadows of the forest as the keynote of the whole film.
I determined to solve the problem by actually filming the sun. These days it is
not uncommon to point the camera directly at the sun, but at the time Kashomon
was being made it was still one of the taboos of cinematography. It was even
thought that the sun’s rays shining directly into your lens would bum the film
in your camera. But my cameraman, Miyagawa Kazuo, boldly defied this con¬
vention and created superb images. The introductory section in particular,
which leads the viewer through the light and shadow of the forest into a world
where the human heart loses its way, was truly magnificent camera work. I feel
that this scene, later praised at the Venice International Film Festival as the first
instance of a camera entering the heart of a forest, was not only one of Miya-
gawa’s masterpieces but a world-class masterpiece of black-and-white cine¬
matography.
And yet, I don’t know what happened to me. Delighted as I was with Miya-
gawa’s work, it seems I forgot to tell him. When I said to myself, “Wonderful,”
I guess I thought I had said “Wonderful” to him at the same time. I didn’t real¬
ize I hadn’t until one day Miyagawa’s old friend ShimuraTakashi (who was play¬
ing the woodcutter in Kashomon) came to me and said, “Miyagawa’s very
concerned about whether his camera work is satisfactory to you.” Recogniz¬
ing my oversight for the first time, I hurriedly shouted “One hundred percent!
One hundred for camera work! One hundred plus!”
There is no end to my recollections of Kashomon. If I tried to write about all
of them, I’d never finish, so I’d like to end with one incident that left an indeli¬
ble impression on me. It has to do with the music.
As I was writing the script, 1 heard the rhythms of a bolero in my head over
the episode of the woman’s side of the story. I asked Flayasaka to write a bolero
kind of music for the scene. When we came to the dubbing of that scene,
Flayasaka sat down next to me and said, “I’ll try it with the music.” In his face I
saw uneasiness and anticipation. My own nervousness and expectancy gave me
a painful sensation in my chest. The screen lit up with the beginning of the scene,
and the strains of the bolero music softly counted out the rhythm. As the scene
progressed, the music rose, but the image and the sound failed to coincide and
seemed to be at odds with each other. “Damn it,” I thought. The multiplication
of sound and image that I had calculated in my head had failed, it seemed. It was
enough to make me break out in a cold sweat.
We kept going. The bolero music rose yet again, and suddenly picture and
sound fell into perfect unison. The mood created was positively eerie. I felt an
icy chill run down my spine, and unwittingly I turned to Hayasaka. He was look¬
ing at me. His face was pale, and I saw that he was shuddering with the same
eerie emotion I felt. From that point on, sound and image proceeded with in-
488 Directors
credible speed to surpass even the calculations I had made in my head. The ef¬
fect was strange and overwhelming.
And that is how Kashomon was made. During the shooting there were two fires
at the Daiei studios. But because we had mobilized the fire engines for our film¬
ing, they were already primed and drilled, so the studios escaped withvery minor
damage.
After Kashomon I made a film of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (Hakuchi, 1 95 1) for
the Shochiku studios. This Idiot was ruinous. I clashed directly with the studio
heads, and then when the reviews on the completed film came out, it was as if
they were a mirror reflection of the studio’s attitude toward me. Without ex¬
ception, they were scathing. On the heels of this disaster, Daiei rescinded its
offer for me to do another film with them.
I listened to this cold announcement at the Chofu studios of Daiei in the Tokyo
suburbs. I walked out through the gate in a gloomy daze, and, not having the
will even to get on the train, I ruminated over my bleak situation as I walked all
the way home to Komae. I concluded that for some time I would have to “eat
cold rice” and resigned myself to this fact. Deciding that it would serve no pur¬
pose to get excited about it, I set out to go fishing at the Tamagawa River. I cast
my line into the river. It immediately caught on something and snapped in two.
Having no replacement with me, I hurriedly put my equipment away. Think¬
ing this was what it was like when bad luck catches up with you, I headed back
home.
I arrived home depressed, with barely enough strength to slide open the door
to the entry. Suddenly my wife came bounding out. “Congratulations!” I was
unwittingly indignant: “For what?” “Kashomon has the Grand Prix.” Kashomon had
won the Grand Prix at the Venice International Film Festival, and I was spared
from having to eat cold rice.
Once again an angel had appeared out of nowhere. I did not even know that
Kashomon had been submitted to the Venice Film Festival. The Japan represen¬
tative of Italiafilm, Giuliana Stramigioli, had seen it and recommended it to
Venice. It was like pouring water into the sleeping ears of the Japanese film in¬
dustry .
Later Kashomon won the American Academy Award for Best Foreign Language
Film. Japanese critics insisted that these two prizes were simply reflections of
Westerners’ curiosity and taste for Oriental exoticism, which struck me then,
and now, as terrible. Why is it that Japanese people have no confidence in the
worth of Japan? Why do they elevate everything foreign and denigrate every¬
thing Japanese? Even the woodblock prints of Utamaro, Hokusai and Sharaku
were not appreciated by Japanese until they were first discovered by the West.
I don’t know how to explain this lack of discernment. I can only despair of the
character of my own people.
Je re my Bernstein
489
Jeremy Bernstein
The New Yorker writer Jeremy Bernstein was one oj the few outsiders allowed to watch
the shooting of Stanley Kubrick’s 200 1: A Space Odyssey (1968), and he visited the
set at a time when the giant centrifuge (which allowed the illusion of weightlessness in
the space voyage scenes) was used. Although Kubrick as usualfilmed in secrecy, the pro¬
duction attracted enormous curiosity, and I remember the anticipation at the film’sfirst
public screening, which was held in Los Angeles on the night before the "official’’ world
premiere in Washington. The audience wasfirst intrigued and then restless; at the inter¬
mission Rock Hudson stalked out, loudly complaining, "Will someone tell me what this
movie is about?" The early reviews were mixed. Then word of mouth set in, 2 00 1 devel¬
oped a following, the film ran for months in many theaters, and it is now enshrined on
the Sight & Sound list of the greatestfilms of all time.
Stanley Kubrick
On December 29, 19 65, shooting of the film began, and in early March the com¬
pany reached the most intricate part of the camerawork, which was to be done
in the interior of a giant centrifuge. One of the problems in space travel will be
weightlessness. While weightlessness has, because of its novelty, a certain glam¬
our and amusement, it would be an extreme nuisance on a long trip, and prob¬
ably a health hazard as well. Our physical systems have evolved to work against
the pull of gravity, and it is highly probable that all sorts of unfortunate things,
such as softening of the bones, would result from exposure to weightlessness
for months at a time. In addition, of course, nothing stays in place without grav¬
ity, and no normal activity is possible unless great care is exercised; the slight¬
est jar can send you hurtling across the cabin. Therefore, many spacecraft
designers figure that some sort of artificial gravity will have to be supplied for
space travelers. In principle, this is very easy to do. An object on the rim of a
49 °
Directors
wheel rotating at a uniform speed is subjected to a constant force pushing it away
from the center, and by adjusting the size of the wheel and the speed of its ro¬
tation this centrifugal force can be made to resemble the force of gravity. Hav¬
ing accepted this notion, Kubrick went one step further and commissioned the
Vickers Engineering Group to make an actual centrifuge, large enough for the
astronauts to live in full time. It took six months to build and cost about three
hundred thousand dollars. The finished product looks from the outside like a
Ferris wheel thirty-eight feet in diameter and can be rotated at a maximum speed
of about three miles an hour. This is not enough to parallel the force of grav¬
ity—the equipment inside the centrifuge has to be bolted to the floor—but it
has enabled Kubrick to achieve some remarkable photographic effects. The
interior, eight feet wide, is fitted out with an enormous computer console, an
electronically operated medical dispensary, a shower, a device for taking an
artificial sunbath, a recreation area, with a Ping-Pong table and an electronic
piano, and five beds with movable plastic domes—hibemacula, where astronauts
who are not on duty can, literally, hibernate for months at a time. (The trip to
Jupiter will take two hundred and fifty-seven days.)
I had seen the centrifuge in the early stages of its construction and very much
wanted to observe it in action, so I was delighted when chance sent me back to
England in the early spring. When I walked through the door of the 2001 set
one morning in March, I must say that the scene that presented itself to me was
overwhelming. In the middle of the hangarlike stage stood the centrifuge, with
cables and lights hanging from every available inch of its steel-girdered super¬
structure . On the floor to one side of its frame was an immense electronic con¬
sole (not a prop), and, in various places, six microphones and three television
receivers. I learned later that Kubrick had arranged a closed-circuit-television
system so that he could watch what was going on inside the centrifuge during
scenes being filmed when he could not be inside himself. Next to the micro¬
phone was an empty canvas chair with “Stanley Kubrick” painted on its back in
fading black letters. Kubrick himself was nowhere to be seen, but everywhere
I looked there were people, some hammering and sawing, some carrying scripts,
some carrying lights. In one corner I saw a woman applying makeup to what ap¬
peared to be an astronaut wearing blue coveralls and leather boots. Over a
loudspeaker, a pleasantly authoritative English voice—belonging, I learned
shortly, to Derek Cracknell, Kubrick’s first assistant director—was saying,
“Will someone bring the Governor’s Polaroid on the double?” A man came up
to me and asked how I would like my tea and whom I was looking for, and al¬
most before I could reply “One lump with lemon” and “Stanley Kubrick,” led
me, in a semi-daze, to an opening at the bottom of the centrifuge. Peering up
into the dazzlingly illuminated interior, I spotted Kubrick lying flat on his back
on the floor of the machine and staring up through the viewfinder of an enor-
Jere my Bernstein
491
mous camera, in complete concentration. Keir Dullea, dressed in shorts and a
white T shirt, and covered by a blue blanket, was lying in an open hibemacu-
lum on the rising curve of the floor. He was apparently comfortably asleep, and
Kubrick was telling him to wake up as simply as possible. “Just open your eyes,”
he said. “Let’s not have any stirring, yawning, and rubbing.”
One of the lights burned out, and while it was being fixed, Kubrick unwound
himself from the camera, spotted me staring openmouthed at the top of the cen¬
trifuge, where the furniture of the crew’s dining quarters was fastened to the
ceiling, and said, “Don’t worry—that stuff is bolted down.” Then he motioned
to me to come up and join him.
No sooner had I climbed into the centrifuge than Cracknell, who turned out
to be a cheerful and all but imperturbable youthful-looking man in tennis shoes
(all the crew working in the centrifuge were wearing tennis shoes, not only to
keep from slipping but to help them climb the steeply curving sides; indeed, some
of them were working while clinging to the bolted-down furniture halfway up
the wall), said, “Here’s your Polaroid, Guv,” and handed Kubrick the camera.
I asked Kubrick what he needed the Polaroid for, and he explained that he used
it for checking subtle lighting effects for color film. He and the director of pho¬
tography, Geoffrey Unsworth, had worked out a correlation between how the
lighting appeared on the instantly developed Polaroid film and the settings on
the movie camera. I asked Kubrick if it was customary for movie directors to
participate so actively in the photographing of a movie, and he said succinctly
that he had never watched any other movie director work.
The light was fixed, and Kubrick went back to work behind the camera. Keir
Dullea was reinstalled in his hibemaculum and the cover rolled shut. “You bet¬
ter take your hands from under the blanket,” Kubrick said. Kelvin Pike, the cam¬
era operator, took Kubrick’s place behind the camera, and Cracknell called for
quiet. The camera began to turn, and Kubrick said, “Open the hatch.” The top
of the hibemaculum slid back with a whirring sound, and Keir Dullea woke up,
without any stirring, yawning, or rubbing. Kubrick, playing the part of the so¬
licitous computer, started feeding him lines.
“Good morning,” said Kubrick. “What do you want for breakfast?”
“Some bacon and eggs would be fine,” Dullea answered simply.
Later, Kubrick told me that he had engaged an English actor to read the com¬
puter’s lines in the serious dramatic scenes, in order to give Dullea and Lock-
wood something more professional to play against, and that in the finished film
he would dub in an American-accented voice. He and Dullea went through the
sequence four or five times, and finally Kubrick was satisfied with what he had.
Dullea bounced out of his hibemaculum, and I asked him whether he was hav¬
ing a good time. He said he was getting a great kick out of all the tricks and gad¬
gets, and added, “This is a happy set, and that’s something.”
Directors
492
When Kubrick emerged from the centrifuge, he was immediately surrounded
by people. “Stanley, there’s a black pig outside for you to look at,” Victor Lyn¬
don was saying. He led the way outside, and, sure enough, in a large truck be¬
longing to an animal trainer was an enormous jet-black pig. Kubrick poked it,
and it gave a suspicious grunt.
“The pig looks good,” Kubrick said to the trainer.
“I can knock it out with a tranquilizer for the scenes when it’s supposed to
be dead,” the trainer said.
“Can you get any tapirs or anteaters?” Kubrick asked.
The trainer said that this would not be an insuperable problem, and Kubrick
explained to me, “We’re going to use them in some scenes about prehistoric
M
man.
At this point, a man carrying a stuffed lion’s head approached and asked
Kubrick whether it would be all right to use.
“The tongue looks phony, and the eyes are only marginal,” Kubrick said, head¬
ing for the set. “Can somebody fix the tongue?”
Back on the set, he climbed into his blue trailer. “Maybe the company can
get back some of its investment selling guided tours of the centrifuge,” he said.
“They might even feature a ride on it.” He added that the work in the machine
was incredibly slow, because it took hours to rearrange all the lights and cam¬
eras for each new sequence. Originally, he said, he had planned on a hundred
and thirty days of shooting for the main scenes, but the centrifuge sequences had
slowed them down by perhaps a week. “I take advantage of every delay and
breakdown to go off by myself and think,” he said. “Something like playing chess
when your opponent takes a long time over his next move.”
At one o’clock, just before lunch, many of the crew went with Kubrick to a
small projection room near the set to see the results of the previous day’s shoot¬
ing. The most prominent scene was a brief one that showed Gary Lockwood
exercising in the centrifuge, jogging around its interior and shadow-boxing to
the accompaniment of a Chopin waltz—picked by Kubrick because he felt that
an intelligent man in 2001 might choose Chopin f or doing exercise to music. As
the film appeared on the screen, Lockwood was shown jogging around the com¬
plete interior circumference of the centrifuge, which appeared to me to defy
logic as well as physics, since when he was at the top he would have needed suc¬
tion cups on his feet to stay glued to the floor. I asked Kubrick how he had
achieved this effect, and he said he was definitely, absolutely not going to tell
me. As the scene went on, Kubrick’s voice could be heard on the sound track,
rising over the Chopin: “Gain a little on the camera, Gary! . . . Now a flurry of
lefts and rights! ... A little more vicious!” After the film had run its course
Kubrick appeared quite pleased with the results, remarking, “It’s nice to get two
minutes of usable film after two days of shooting.”
Satyajit Ray
493
Satyajit Ray
Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, the first part of the Apu Trilogy, is often listed as one
of the bestfilms of all time. As Ray (1921—1992) makes clear here, thefirst day of film¬
ing was also thefirst day he ever directed. At the Hawaii Film Festival a few years ago 1
met Subatra Mitra, Ray’s cinematographer on this and other great films. He told me it
was also hisfirst day as a cinematographer; he had never shot afoot of film before and
was quietly terrified. At the festival Mitra was given the Eastman Kodak Award for Ex¬
cellence in Cinematography, and in his acceptance speech he thanked not Satyajit Ray —
that went without saying—but his camera and hisfilm.
“A Long Time on the Little Road”
I remember the first day’s shooting of Pather Panchali very well. It was in the fes¬
tive season, in October, and the last of the big pujas was taking place that day.
Our location was seventy-five miles away from Calcutta. As our taxi sped along
the Grand Trunk Road, we passed through several suburban towns and villages
and heard the drums and even had fleeting glimpses of some images. Someone
said it would bring us luck. I had my doubts, but I wished to believe it. All who
set about making films need luck as much as they need the other things: talent,
money, perseverance and so on. We needed a little more of it than most.
I knew this first day was really a sort of rehearsal for us, to break us in, as it
were. For most of us it was a start from scratch. There were eight on our unit
of whom only one—Bansi, the art director—had previous professional experi¬
ence. We had a new cameraman, Subroto, and an old, much-used Wall camera
which happened to be the only one available for hire on that particular day. Its
one discernible advantage seemed to be a device to ensure smoothness of pan¬
ning. We had no sound equipment, as the scene was to be a silent one.
494
Directors
It was an episode in the screenplay where the two children of the story,
brother and sister, stray from their village and chance upon a field of kaash flow¬
ers. The two have had a quarrel, and here in this enchanted setting they are
reconciled and their long journey is rewarded by their first sight of a railway
train. I chose to begin with this scene because on paper it seemed both effec¬
tive and simple. I considered this important, because the whole idea behind
launching the production with only 8,000 rupees in the bank was to produce
quickly and cheaply a reasonable length of rough cut which we hoped would
establish our bonafides, the lack of which had so far stood in the way of our
getting a financier.
At the end of the first day’s shooting we had eight shots. The children be¬
haved naturally, which was a bit of luck because I had not tested them. As for
myself, I remember feeling a bit strung up in the beginning; but as work pro¬
gressed my nerves relaxed and in the end I even felt a kind of elation. However,
the scene was only half finished, and on the following Sunday we were back on
the same location. But was it the same location? It was hard to believe it. What
was on the previous occasion a sea of fluffy whiteness was now a mere expanse
of uninspiring brownish grass. We knew kaash was a seasonal flower, but surely
they were not that short-lived? A local peasant provided the explanation. The
flowers, he said, were food to the cattle. The cows and buffaloes had come to
graze the day before and had literally chewed up the scenery.
This was a big setback. We knew of no other kaash field that would provide
the long shots that I needed. This meant staging the action in a different setting,
and the very thought was heart-breaking. Who would have known then that we
would be back on the identical location exactly two years later and indulge in
the luxury of reshooting the entire scene with the same cast and the same unit
but with money provided by the Government of West Bengal.
When I look back on the making of Pather Panchali, I cannot be sure whether
it has meant more pain to me than pleasure. It is difficult to describe the pecu¬
liar torments of a production held up for lack of funds. The long periods of
enforced idleness (there were two gaps totalling a year and a half) produce noth¬
ing but the deepest gloom. The very sight of the scenario is sickening, let alone
thoughts of embellishing it with details, or brushing up the dialogue.
But work—even a day’s work—has rewards, not the least of which is the
gradual comprehension of the complex and fascinating nature of film making it¬
self. The edicts of the theorists leamt assiduously over the years doubtless per¬
form some useful function at the back of your mind, but grappling with the
medium in a practical way for the first time, you realise (a) that you know rather
less about it than you thought you did; ( b) that the theorists do not provide all
the answers, and ( c) that your approach should derive not from Dovzhenko’s
Earth , however much you may love that dance in the moonlight, but from the
Satyajit Ray
49S
earth, the soil, of your own country—assuming, of course, that your story has
its roots in it.
Bibhutibhusan Banerji’s Pather Panchali was serialised in a popular Bengali mag¬
azine in the early 1930s. The author had been brought up in a village and the
book contained much that was autobiographical. The manuscript had been
turned down by the publishers on the ground that it lacked a story. The maga¬
zine, too, was initially reluctant to accept it, but later did so on condition that
it would be discontinued if the readers so wished. But the story of Apu and Durga
was a hit from the first instalment. The book, published a year or so later, was
an outstanding critical and popular success and has remained on the best-seller
list ever since.
I chose Pather Panchali for the qualities that made it a great book: its human¬
ism, its lyricism, and its ring of truth. I knew I would have to do a lot of prun¬
ing and reshaping—I certainly could not go beyond the first half, which ended
with the family’s departure for Banaras—but at the same time I felt that to cast
the thing into a mould of cut-and-dried narrative would be wrong. The script
had to retain some of the rambling quality of the novel because that in itself
contained a clue to the feel of authenticity: life in a poor Bengali village does
ramble.
Considerations of form, rhythm or movement did not worry me much at this
stage. I had my nucleus: the family, consisting of husband and wife, the two chil¬
dren, and the old aunt. The characters had been so conceived by the author that
there was a constant and subtle interplay between them. I had my time span of
one year. I had my contrasts—pictorial as well as emotional: the rich and the
poor, the laughter and the tears, the beauty of the countryside and the grimness
of poverty existing in it. Finally, I had the two natural halves of the story cul¬
minating in two poignant deaths. What more could a scenarist want?
What I lacked was firsthand acquaintance with the milieu of the story. I could,
of course, draw upon the book itself, which was a kind of encyclopaedia of Ben¬
gali rural life, but I knew that this was not enough. In any case, one had only to
drive six miles out of the city to get to the heart of the authentic village.
While far from being an adventure in the physical sense, these explorations
into the village nevertheless opened up a new and fascinating world. To one bom
and bred in the city, it had a new flavour, a new texture: you wanted to observe
and probe, to catch the revealing details, the telling gestures, the particular turns
of speech. You wanted to fathom the mysteries of “atmosphere.” Does it con¬
sist in the sights, or in the sounds? How to catch the subtle difference between
dawn and dusk, or convey the grey humid stillness that precedes the first mon¬
soon shower? Is sunlight in spring the same as sunlight in autumn? . . .
The more you probed the more was revealed, and familiarity bred not con¬
tempt but love, understanding, tolerance. Problems of film making began to
4-96 Directors
recede into the background and you found yourself belittling the importance
of the camera. After all, you said, it is only a recording instrument. The im¬
portant thing is Truth. Get at it and you’ve got your great humanist master¬
piece.
But how wrong you were! The moment you are on the set the three-legged
instrument takes charge. Problems come thick and fast. Where to place the cam¬
era? High or low? Near or far? On the dolly or on the ground? Is the thirty-five
O.K. or would you rather move back and use the fifty? Get too close to the ac¬
tion and the emotion of the scene spills over; get too far back and the thing
becomes cold and remote. To each problem that arises you must find a quick
answer. If you delay, the sun shifts and makes nonsense of your light continu¬
ity.
Sound is a problem too. Dialogue has been reduced to a minimum, but you
want to cut down further. Are those three words really necessary, or can you
find a telling gesture to take their place? The critics may well talk of a laudable
attempt at a rediscovery of the fundamentals of silent cinema, but you know
within your heart that while there may be some truth in that, equally true was
your anxiety to avoid the uninspiring business of dubbing and save on the cost
of sound film.
Cost, indeed, was a dominant factor at all times, influencing the very style
of the film. Another important factor—and I would not want to generalise on
this—was the human one. In handling my actors I found it impossible to get to
the stage of impersonal detachment where I could equate them with so much
raw material to be moulded and remoulded at will. How can you make a woman
of eighty stand in the hot midday sun and go through the same speech and the
same actions over and over again while you stand by and watch with half-closed
eyes and wait for that precise gesture and tone of voice that will mean perfec-
tion for you? This meant, inevitably, fewer rehearsals and fewer takes.
Sometimes you are lucky and everything goes right in the first take. Some¬
times it does not and you feel you will never get what you are aiming at. The
number of takes increases, the cost goes up, the qualms of conscience become
stronger than the urge for perfection and you give up, hoping that the critics
will forgive and the audience will overlook. You even wonder whether perhaps
you were not being too finicky and the thing was not as bad or as wrong as you
thought it was.
And so on and on it goes, this preposterous balancing act, and you keep hop¬
ing that out of all this will somehow emerge Art. At times when the strain is too
much you want to give up. You feel it is going to kill you, or at least kill the
artist in you. But you carry on, mainly because so much and so many are involved,
and the day comes when the last shot is in the can and you are surprised to find
yourself feeling not happy and relieved, but sad. And you are not alone in this.
Satyajit Ray
497
Everybody, from “Auntie,” for whom it has been an exciting if strenuous come¬
back after thirty years of oblivion, down to the little urchin who brought the
live spiders and the dead toad, shares this feeling.
To me it is the inexorable rhythm of its creative process that makes film mak¬
ing so exciting in spite of the hardships and the frustrations. Consider this
process: you have conceived a scene, any scene. Take the one where a young
girl, frail of body but full of some elemental zest, gives herself up to the first
monsoon shower. She dances in joy while the big drops pelt her and drench her.
The scene excites you not only for its visual possibilities but for its deeper im¬
plications as well: that rain will be the cause of her death.
You break down the scene into shots, make notes and sketches. Then the time
comes to bring the scene to life. You go out into the open, scan the vista, choose
your setting. The rain clouds approach. You set up your camera, have a last quick
rehearsal. Then the “take.” But one is not enough. This is a key scene. You must
have another while the shower lasts. The camera turns, and presently your
scene is on celluloid.
Off to the lab. You wait, sweating—this is September—while the ghostly
negative takes its own time to emerge. There is no hurrying this process. Then
the print, the “rushes.” This looks good, you say to yourself. But wait. This is
only the content, in its bits and pieces, and not the form. How is it going to join
up? You grab your editor and rush off to the cutting room. There is a gruelling
couple of hours, filled with aching suspense, while the patient process of cut¬
ting and joining goes on. At the end you watch the thing on the moviola. Even
the rickety old machine cannot conceal the effectiveness of the scene. Does this
need music, or is the incidental sound enough? But that is another stage in the
creative process, and must wait until all the shots have been joined up into scenes
and all the scenes into sequences and the film can be comprehended in its to¬
tality. Then, and only then, can you tell—if you can bring to bear on it that de¬
tachment and objectivity—if your dance in the rain has really come off.
But is this detachment, this objectivity, possible? You know you worked
honestly and hard, and so did everybody else. But you also know that you had
to make changes, compromises—not without the best of reasons—on the set
and in the cutting room. Is it better for them or worse? Is your own satisfaction
the final test or must you bow to the verdict of the majority? You cannot be sure.
But you can be sure of one thing: you are a better man for having made it.
498 Directors
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini (1920—1993) was not born in Rome—his childhood in Rimini is well
documented in hisfilms and writings—but he loved it and knew it as well as anyone, and
in La Dolce Vita ( i960) he made the Via Veneto, its notorious street of nightlife, world-
famous. It was a street he knew well for many years, as a cafe artist who supported him¬
self in his early days in Rome by sketching the patrons in restaurants. He was thrown out
of so many of them, he recalls, that after he became a successful director, he stayed away
from the street for a while, afraid of being recognized. But eventually a film about the
street and its denizens began to take shape in his imagination.
from Fellini on Fellini
For a while I steered clear of Via Veneto and its surroundings, afraid of being
recognised as the painter of shop windows. Besides, my partner was not par¬
ticularly successful at it either, so we decided to make a change. The “Marc Au-
relio” had accepted a few of my short articles in the meantime, and suddenly all
was set fair, when the war intervened. Even the declaration of war is linked, in
my mind, with a memory of Via Veneto. I had heard Mussolini’s voice (“Peo¬
ple of Italy, to arms . . . ”) on the wireless in the porter ’sroomatthe “Marc Au-
relio” and had been wandering about the streets on my own, worried and shaken.
Rome was empty: in the whole of Via Veneto, with its trees fully in leaf since
it was June, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Then a man came riding down on a
bicycle towards Piazza Barberini without touching the pedals. He raised a hand
from the handle-bars to greet me and shouted: “Hey, war’s been declared!”
The years went by and my feeling of inferiority about Via Veneto went away
too. Throughout the war, the liberation and the postwar years, the intellectu¬
als continued to gather at Rosati’s, as if they were its guardians. The only dif¬
ference now, was that one of them occasionally greeted me. And I myself was
Federico Fellini
499
entering their circle more casually, through meetings with script writers and
directors like Pinelli, Lattuada and Germi. We would often spend hours dis¬
cussing the psychology of some character or the possible variants on some dra¬
matic situation, sunk deep in the armchairs of a cafe; and meantime Rome was
gradually changing outside, becoming the navel of a world sated with living in
a new jazz age, waiting for a third world war, or for a miracle, or for the Mar¬
tians. The cinema exploded, the Americans came, cafe society prospered, the
women became marvellous, the sack dress came into fashion, and cars began to
look like legendary monsters. One evening I sat enthralled for a long time, gaz¬
ing at a fat man with a black moustache drinking mineral water at a table in the
Cafe de Paris, enjoying the cool sunset with a girl like some fruitful goddess: it
was the ex-king of Egypt, Farouk. I watched the photographers prowling round
his table and realise that they were pushing their bulbs closer and closer to him,
just to annoy. In the end Farouk leapt furiously to his feet, the table was over¬
turned, people rushed up and the cameras flashed more than ever.
I spent many evenings with the photographer-reporters of Via Veneto, chat¬
ting with Tazio Secchiaroli and the others, and getting them to tell me about the
tricks of their trade. Flow they fixed on their victim, how they behaved to make
him nervous, how they prepared their pieces, exactly as required, for the vari¬
ous papers. They had amusing tales to tell: waiting in ambush for hours, thrilling
escapes, dramatic chases. One evening I actually took them all out to dinner,
and I must admit they thought up all kinds of tall stories for my benefit. In the
end Secchiaroli said: “Stop inventing, you idiots, you’re talking to an old hand
at the game,” and I didn’t know whether to take it as a compliment or an insult.
I started planning scenes and having ideas for characters based on the style of
life which was now so precisely characteristic of the place. One evening I gave
a lift to a blond young man wearing eye-shadow whom everyone called
Chierichetta, as I was determined to discover what such a person was like. He
told me he lived at Borgo San Pio, near St. Peter’s; and that he was very Catholic,
loving only his mother and Jesus—so much so that he would have liked to wear
his hair in a Jesus style. While we were wandering aimlessly around the Appia
Antica district he burst out with his troubles, saying he wanted to change his life,
that he could hear the voice of conscience, exactly as if there was someone in¬
side him saying: “Mind what you’re doing.” He wanted to set up with a lawyer,
a serious person, and let all the rest go, all the more so because there was going
to be an apocalypse within the next few years and all the wicked would be swept
away in a new deluge. He had a way of giving form to his fears which, though
it never quite ceased to be grotesque, nevertheless had a sincerely religious note
about it. What he said struck me profoundly.
With Flaiano, Pinelli and Brunello Rondi I checked my impressions of the ma¬
terial I had been gathering and went ahead in the vague direction of a film which
J oo
Directors
would deal with the life of those years. And thus, through the warm summer
evenings of 1958, along Via Veneto, La dolce vita was bom, and with it all my
arduous trek from producer to producer, from office to office, determined to
fight for a film which, in professional circles, was said to be a failure before it
had been started.
When we came to start work, Via Veneto became a problem. The city au¬
thorities allowed us to film in the street only from two till six in the morning
and hedged this permission with all kinds of reservations. For the scene in which
Marcello Mastroianni took Anita home, after her bathe in the Trevi Fountain,
there were no difficulties. We started off in the middle of the night and man¬
aged to “capture” a really lovely dawn, with Anita’s teeth chattering with cold,
Marcello worried over the punches he was to get from the athletic Lex Barker,
and the photo-reporters, the paparazzi, jumping around the set like a lot of
devils. The scene in the car between Marcello and Anouk Aimee was more com¬
plicated, because 1 didn’t want to use any tricks in directing it. There were end¬
less discussions with the police and in the end we got permission to film the scene
in movement so long as we didn’t ever stop and snarl up the traffic. Clemente
Fracassi organised a line of cars that looked like a procession of the Three Wise
Men. I started it in my car, driving half twisted backwards to see what was hap¬
pening. Marcello and Anouk followed me in an open Cadillac. Anouk could
hardly drive but the scene made it necessary for her to do so: she was pale, tense
and frightened. Beside her, Mastroianni, who prides himself on being an expe¬
rienced driver, was suffering horribly. They were followed by the car carrying
the camera and then by the row of production cars, while little Fiats and mopeds
carrying the assistants bustled about at the sides of the long column.
As the scene required several takes, we made the same trip by turning off
round the blocks of buildings and reassembling the procession in Via Ludovisi.
A large number of people had gathered on the pavements to watch this triumphal
procession go by; a scene that was both swanky and slightly sordid, as it always
is when you’re filming in the midst of ordinary people. I remember particularly
the face of a curious onlooker outside the “Excelsior,” a man wearing a beret,
with a face of dark leather, like a saracen. This young fellow was waiting anx¬
iously for me to pass and, knowing perfectly well that I couldn’t stop without
the skies falling, when I was just a yard or so away yelled one of those Roman
words at me that cannot be printed in a newspaper. This happened four, five,
six times: as soon as I arrived at the traffic lights the saracen would stare at me,
grinning from a distance, savouring the prospect of insulting me. Then when I
came close to him—bang, every time he would fling that word at me, always
the same word but spoken each time with mounting enthusiasm. When I went
by the seventh time I was fed up with him and would have stopped the car and
got out and hit him if I hadn’t been afraid of ruining a night’s work. So I merely
Federico Fel 1ini
5 oi
answered him in kind, using words and gestures that only my impotent fury at
the time could justify. As soon as the filming was finished and the column of cars
had broken up in Via Sardegna, I asked a couple of the toughest drivers to fol¬
low me and ran back to the “Excelsior” to settle accounts. Butthe manwho had
sworn at me had vanished, melted away. Even today I have his image stamped
on my mind, with his beret and everything else, and I still haven’t given up hope
of meeting him some day.
It was the shock of this incident that made me force the producers to let me
build a reconstruction of Via Veneto. I had to film a number of scenes at cafe
tables, among them the one in which Marcello meets his father, and it just
wasn’t possible to film them late at night or using hidden cameras. So Piero Gher-
ardi, the designer, started taking measurements and built me a large slice of Via
Veneto on Number j stage at Cinecitta. We even had a party there, inviting peo¬
ple from the other Via Veneto, and the illusion was perfect. All the stars of the
film were at it: Anita, Anouk, Yvonne Furneaux, Luise Rainer, who was to ap¬
pear in a scene we dropped later on. Their presence caused very delicate prob¬
lems of precedence, which amused me a great deal at the party. Only towards
the end of it, as an answer to the voices of gloom criticising the cost of it all and
the time it was taking, did I say to a journalist: “We’ve decided to have a party
like this every three months while we’re working on the film.” Angelo Rizzoli
heard me and merely waved a threatening fist at me from the opposite pave¬
ment of our imaginary street.
The Via Veneto which Gherardi rebuilt was exact down to the smallest de¬
tail, but it had one thing peculiar to it: it was flat instead of sloping. As I worked
on it I got so used to this perspective that my annoyance with the real Via
Veneto grew even greater and now, I think, it will never disappear. When I pass
the Cafe de Paris, I cannot help feeling that the real Via Veneto was the one on
Stage j, and that the dimensions of the rebuilt street were more accurate or at
any rate more agreeable. I even feel an invisible temptation to exercise over the
real street the despotic authority I had over the fake one. This is all a compli¬
cated business which I ought to talk about to someone who understands psy¬
choanalysis.
Anthony Quinn
Anthony Quinn is one of the great exuberant presences in the movies, rememberedfor Viva
Zapata!, La Strada, Lawrence of Arabia, and Zorba the Greek, but he has also been
present in countless other movies for half a century, some good, some bad, some priceless
(see his Aristotle Onassis in The Greek Tycoon). At eighty he wrote his autobiography,
One Man Tango, and here he writes about meeting a young Italian named Federico Fellini
who wanted to make a movie in a way that the visiting starfrom Hollywood could only
have misgivings about. Quinn’s book is one of the rare star autobiographies worth read¬
ing; it’s not that he always tells the truth (who knows?) but that he re-creates his memo¬
ries so vividly. The Rome he portrays in this book is the same city that Fellini himself was
to record in La Dolce Vita, a film that essentially brought an end to the era it was about.
from One Man Tango
Neo-realist Cowboys
It is a funny thing, that I am here, now, in this restaurant. I have been return¬
ing to this place for years, but I have come today for a reason. It is only now that
I puzzle together the realization.
This, after all, is the same place an exciting young director took me to dis¬
cuss a script, back in 1953, over lunch. He wore a quizzical smile and an out¬
landish cowboy hat, each of which he refused to take off during the meal. It was
not much of a script—only a few pages—and yet it held the rough edges of a
masterpiece. The director had sent it to me the night before, but it was in Ital¬
ian, and I pushed it back across the table, unread, asking my host to tell me the
story instead.
The story he told would change my life completely, and immediately, and it
is a wonder that I have returned to the very spot of its unfolding. How is it that
S°i
An t ho ny Q_u i n n
in a moment of impulsive rediscovery a man manages to retrace his steps so pre¬
cisely? Is there some path that has been predetermined for me? Is God pulling
my strings and moving me along by design? I had no idea where I was headed,
when I set out from Vigna S. Antonio this morning, and yet at every turn I stum¬
ble across a telling reminder of my past. Either I have lived too much of a life
to avoid such coincidence, or I have entrusted myself so thoroughly to the
whims of memory that coincidence cannot help but find me.
Indeed, as the headwaiter returns with my second bottle of wine, I realize
that even he fits in the correlation. He is the same man who served that fateful
lunch, all those years ago. What are the odds of this? It is not his restaurant—
he is just a hired hand—and yet he is still here. He approaches, and seems to
make the same connection. The director has become our mutual acquaintance,
our secret. We talk of him often. He is the one thing we share.
“Our friend,” the waiter says, filling my glass, “he was something, no?”
He was something, yes. Federico Fellini had only made two full-length pic¬
tures at the time of our first meeting— The White Sheik and I Vitelloni —and I had
not seen either one, but his reputation was already enormous. He was one of
the leading neo-realists, and the talk of the Italian cinema. I did not know what
a neo-realist was, but figured I would find out. The ridiculous cowboy hat did
nothing to diminish his standing, and he held forth underneath its wide brim as
if he had worn one all his life.
I had gone to Rome earlier that year, as the axis of the motion picture in¬
dustry tilted toward Europe. Italian pictures such as Open City, Shoeshine, Paisan,
and The Bicycle Thief were having a tremendous impact in Hollywood, and sig¬
naled a renaissance in movie making. In contrast, American pictures seemed
locked in an industrial and creative crisis, and hopelessly stale. Now that I was
enjoying some sudden success, I wanted to act on the richest possible stage, sur¬
rounded by the biggest talents. The only audience I craved was an audience of
my peers. I needed to be where it mattered most, so I packed up my family and
followed the wave.
It was an enchanted time. I fell in love with Rome the moment I set foot in
the city. Six hours later, I was in a hospital with food poisoning—it might have
been the fava, the pecuno, or the wine—but that was part of Rome’s charm. It
gave as good as it took. Right away I felt the inventive energy that Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Joyce had created in Montparnasse. Rome had its own
Gertrude Steins, but its literary explosion was fueled by images. The artists of
this renaissance were not producing paintings for churches, or manuscripts for
the ages, but pictures for movie houses. What the hell’did I care? To me, one
artist was much like another. All expression is the same. What difference did it
make if we worked in a modern medium, as long as we worked well and re¬
mained true to our calling?
Directors
S°4
The city was seething with moviemakers from all over the world. It was like
Hollywood, New York, and Cannes, all rolled into one. Most deals were made
on Via Veneto, over Campari or espresso. Every player had to make an ap¬
pearance. On Sunday mornings, sidewalk cafes on both sides of the street were
filled to overflowing. An actor’s popularity was measured by how many scripts
he was offered as he traversed the street. Kirk Douglas, with whom I worked
in Ulysses, my first Italian picture (produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo
Ponti), used to engage me in a singular game of one-upmanship. One Sunday,
he ran the gauntlet from the Excelsior Hotel to the Porta Pinciana and back again,
returning with nineteen legitimate offers.
He topped my best by two.
I had no frame of reference for such a spectacle. In Hollywood, the stars would
only assemble at premieres or awards ceremonies, but along the Via Veneto it
was common to see Greg Peck, Ingrid Bergman, Bill Holden, Anna Magnani,
Gene Kelly, Silvana Mangano, Clark Gable, Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper,
Jennifer Jones, or Errol Flynn turn out for the sidewalk show, often on the same
afternoon. The six blocks between the Excelsior and the Porta Pinciana were
the center of the motion picture industry, and we were drawn to it as if by suc¬
tion.
To walk those six blocks with aplomb became quite an accomplishment, and
a test of confidence. Ingrid Bergman strolled with a stately Nordic gait, like a
conquering Viking. Coop refused to run the obstacle course; he saved his show¬
manship for the screen, but his refraining was itself a powerful statement. Kirk
Douglas was probably the most successful at it—he overwhelmed everyone with
his infectious enthusiasm—but I preferred Anna Magnani’s majestic style. She
paraded down the street with her two black German shepherds, while all other
activity came to a halt. She walked that road just as Calpurnia must have walked
through ancient Rome, the empress of all she surveyed.
I arrived during springtime and felt a part of things from the first. Rome is
like that, I have come to realize, and in this it is like no other city in the world.
All the great places sneak up on you—Paris has to be discovered: Athens takes
its time—but only Rome grabs you at the outset, and never lets go. I was im¬
mediately drunk with its beauty, and felt the city had something to say to me,
just. We shared a secret, Rome and I, and for the longest time I was not telling
a soul.
The steps of the Piazza di Spagna were awash in color, limned by huge pot¬
ted azaleas advertising the change in season. The entire city seemed to be on a
festive kick. It was just eight years since the end of the war, and the energy that
had been capped during the German occupation was still in release. And no peo¬
ple are more eager to release their energy, I learned, than the Italians. There
was a famous line about Italians—“Forty million great actors, and only the bad
Anthony Quinn joj
ones make movies!”—and its root was on every face, on every comer. It was a
place that breathed life, and gave life in return.
It was wonderful.
I ran the Via Veneto gauntlet immediately, and went to work. From Ulysses,
I moved to a dramatic version of Cavelleiia Rusticana (in 3-D, no less!), and a con¬
voluted Giuseppe Amato picture called Donne Proibite, with Linda Darnell, who
no longer thought I was a fairy. When one picture wrapped, I went straight to
another.
Katherine and I lived in the city, in a house rented from Eduardo De Filippo’s
brother, and I took to the lifestyle right away. My wife was less sure of the
change, and less sure of me. She was beginning to think I was crazy—talking to
myself, and my father; stalking the demons that still prowled our bed—and I
was beginning to think she might be right. I could find no happiness in our mar¬
riage, no peace. I walked around looking for answers to questions that had not
yet occurred to me. Katherine was also searching. She had become a deeply re¬
ligious person, and was by now extremely active in the Moral Rearmament
movement, dedicated to the moral awakening of mankind, through faith and pu¬
rity. (These evangelists had a hold on her I could never understand!) Our daugh¬
ter Valentina was bom just the year before, and I think we both recognized the
child’s birth as the beginning of our last act. We might stay together for the rest
of our lives—for the sake of the children, for appearances, perhaps even for our¬
selves—but the marriage was dying. After more than fifteen years, it was clear
that neither one of us had the power (or the inclination) to revive it.
Work was my release, my escape. I took a part in another Ponti—De Lau-
rentiis production, Attila, Flagello di Dio —as Attila the Hum, opposite Sophia
Loren and Irene Papas. It was to mark the beginning of a long association with
the fiery Greek actress, who at the time preferred to be called “Ereenee.” She
had an intensity about her that was difficult to ignore, but her frailty was what
I found most appealing. We were too much alike to ever truly get along. She
seemed to be of my blood. She could have been my sister or my grandmother.
My feelings for her were mixed with incestuous guilt, but I could not look away
from them.
Irene was the kind of girl who walked into your room and held up her hand.
She would not talk to you until she looked under your bed, through your book¬
cases and your collection of records and photographs. Then she would know who
you were. I remarked that her cataloging would be useless with me—I was liv¬
ing with rented furnishings!—but she was determined. I had no idea what the
bad hotel paintings told her about me, but she did not go away.
The Attila production was notable for a comic disaster that might have shut
down the entire picture. If it was up to me, it would have.
We shot a great many scenes on Monte Cavo, in Rocca di Papa, just south of
Directors
506
Rome. One afternoon, at the beginning of a rare snowstorm, the director left
to shoot a few scenes that did not involve Irene or me. He took the entire crew
with him, and left the two of us in a hotel up on a hill. We welcomed the short
break. There was a bar and a restaurant. It would just be a few hours. We would
be fine.
I had spent hours in makeup and wardrobe that morning, and it made no sense
to take everything off just to put it back on again in the afternoon, so I walked
around the hotel in a suit of armor. My eyes were pinched back with a power¬
ful glue, to leave me looking properly Asian and barbaric. I was preparing to
attack Rome in my next scene, and this was what you looked like when you at¬
tacked Rome. Irene too was dressed in a wild outfit, and we lounged around
like two beasts from another century.
Actually, for a while, it was rather fun, noodling around the old hotel with
Irene in period costume, but the novelty wore off soon enough when we no¬
ticed the snowstorm getting worse. There were no wristwatches in the Dark
Ages, and we lost all track of time. Irene walked over to the window and gasped.
“Tony, look,” she said. “The snow. It’s blocking the door.”
I went over to see for myself. The snow was about three feet deep. There
were drifts reaching up to the windows. The wind and fog made it difficult to
see for more than a few feet.
“What the hell time is it?” I wondered.
Irene had no idea. We went down to the front desk to use the hotel telephone.
It was four o’clock. Four o’clock! Jesus, where the hell did everybody go? We
could not get an outside line at first, but eventually we reached the studio in
Rome. I got one of De Laurentiis’s assistants on the other end. “Where the fuck
are you people?” I railed. “Are you gonna use us today or what?”
“You’re still up there?” the kid said. He explained that shooting broke sev¬
eral hours ago, when the snows threatened the roads. Everyone had been sent
home.
“Yes, we’re still up here. Where are we gonna go?”
The kid was scared for his job, but it was not his fault. “Mr. Quinn,” he said.
“I’m terribly sorry. Would you mind staying in the hotel tonight?”
“You’re fuckin’ right, I mind. I can’t stay with Irene in the hotel. Jesus, all
of Rome will be talking about it. You get a car up here.”
“We can’t get a car,” the kid tried to reason. “The roads are closed. And that
hill, leading up to the hotel, that hill must be treacherous.”
The manager could not help but overhear my tirade, and he offered one of
the hotel trucks to take us back down Monte Cavo and into Rome. “It’s just a
bread truck, Mr. Quinn,” he cautioned, “and there’s no room in the cab, but
you should make it down the hill. The driver needs to get back down to the bak¬
ery, so he’s going anyway.”
Anthony Qjj i n n 507
So Irene and I piled into the back of the truck, dressed like barbarians and
surrounded by sacks filled with fresh-baked bread. Jesus, we must have been a
sight! We slipped down that hill like it was an amusement park ride. I was cer¬
tain we would fly off the side of the road and tumble to our deaths in the valley
below.
What a way to go!—crushed by a bakery truck, smelling of blood and flour,
dressed as Attila the Hun. I imagined the headlines.
By this time, the snow had stopped and the skies cleared. The countryside
was absolutely magnificent, like a winter wonderland, but I did not care about
the scenery. I was cold, and tired, and hungry. I wanted to go home.
The driver made to let us out at the bottom of the hill, but I was not mov¬
ing. “We can’t get out here,” I shouted. “Look how we’re dressed! We’re in
costume, goddamn it!” Outside I could see children playing in the streets. It was
like a mid-aftemoon holiday. The entire town was out to romp in the snow. The
last thing I needed was to step from the truck as Attila the Hun, into the mid¬
dle of that scene.
I ripped the glue-mask from my temples in anger—I still have the scars!—
and then I gave the driver about two hundred dollars in U.S. money to take us
back to Rome.
The next day, I refused to go to work. I was furious at the director. What
kind of asshole maroons his two stars in the middle of one of the worst storms
in memory? What was he thinking?
“Fuck you,” I said, when someone at the studio called to see where I was.
“I’m not coming in.”
The day after that, it was the same. I stayed home for a week. Every day they
called, and every day I told them to go to hell. Finally, I thought I had punished
them enough. A week was enough time for a proper tantrum. Anything more
would have been unprofessional. I had wanted to shut down the picture, but I
thought it was enough that I crippled it.
I got into my car and drove to the studio, but they were no longer expect¬
ing me. “What the fuck are you doing here?” De Laurentiis said, when I reported
for work.
“I’m here to finish the picture,” I said. “I was too mad to come back to work,
but I’m not mad anymore. I’ve held out long enough. I know I’ve been costing
you a lot of money.”
Dino flashed a villainous smile. “Not exactly,” he said. “We’re collecting in¬
surance. Your little protest is actually making us a profit.”
“You bastard,” I laughed. “I’m stewing at home, teaching you a lesson, and
you’re making money?” It was a fitting irony.
“Go back home,” Dino said, conspiratorially. “Go back to bed. The insurance
company is sending someone to check you out. You must tell them you’ve had
jo8 Directors
a horrible experience. Tell them you don’t know when you’ll be able to come
back to work.” He hurried me back to my car, giggling like a boy caught with
his hand in the cookie jar.
The making of Attila was also notable as counterpoint, for it was in the mid¬
dle of my self-imposed exile that I first met Fellini. I had played opposite his
wife, the actress Giulietta Masina, and she was forever touting her brilliant hus¬
band. It seemed that everyone was singing the man’s praises. For all its grandeur,
the Italian film community was rather intimate; it did not take long to recog¬
nize the players, and to know everybody’s business. Fellini’s name was all over
the place. He was like an exciting storm on the horizon, and all we could do
was secure ourselves against him.
Giulietta tried to arrange a meeting while we were shooting Donne Proibite,
but for some reason we did not get together until I had begun work on Attila.
She was anxious for me to work with her husband, she said, because it was meant
to be. I was the man Fellini was looking for to make his next picture.
Well, I did not know about that, but I did want to meet him. My friends In¬
grid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini told me to take absolutely any part he of¬
fered me, at any price. “You must work with him,” urged Rossellini, who had
given Fellini his first break as a screenwriter. “It will mean everything.”
I liked Fellini immediately, even with the silly cowboy hat. He gave me the
most marvelous piece of advice. He had seen me interviewed by some Italian
journalists, and thought that I had been too forthcoming in my response. “Why
do you tell these people the truth?”he wondered from behind his crooked smile.
“I do not understand it. Are you psychoanalyzing yourself? Are you using your
confessions so that you may fight your way out of them? Is that why you do it?”
He did not wait for a reply, but continued talking. “Me,” he said, “I never tell
the truth to a journalist. I always lie. It is like an exercise to me, because when
I lie I have to use my imagination, I have to think. Tell them whatever you want
and they will believe you. Tell them you are making a million dollars a picture.
Tell them you have an identical twin who works in a fish hatchery. Tell them
and you will read it in the papers the next day.”
I looked at him with deep admiration. It had never occurred to me to bull¬
shit my way through the trappings of celebrity. “It is a remarkable philosophy,”
I allowed.
“What philosophy?” he dismissed. “It is just a game. I make up stories, then
I make a picture out of it. You, you tell the truth and you’re stuck with it. You
don’t move anywhere. Creatively, you don’t move.”
Perhaps he was right. The story he had made up and had now come to tell
me was about a miserable minstrel who travels the back roads of Italy, staging
cheesy roadside attractions for the locals. He is part showman, part strongman,
part no man at all. He lives in a tiny shack of a trailer, hitched to the back of a
Anthony Quinn
5 09
beat-up motorcycle. He collects a simple girl from a small village and works her
into his act. He treats her like a slave. They set off together on separate mis¬
sions; to the girl, it is an adventure, and the chance to serve the man who has
come to claim her; to the man, it is another leg of his long escape, and the chance
to squeeze a few extra pennies from the townspeople along the way.
Fellini was calling his picture La Strada —The Road—and to him it was all
about one man’s bitter loneliness, and his rejection of the love and devotion of
the one woman who would have him. I listened to Fellini’s tale and for a mo¬
ment thought he was talking about me.
I still did not know from neo-realism, but I liked the story well enough, and
I was anxious to leam what all the fuss was about surrounding this looming giant
of the Italian cinema. Fellini did not look like any giant, but he was an interest¬
ing fellow and he seemed to care about pictures. I told him I would gladly play
the part of Zampano, the wandering strongman.
He asked me what my salary was and I told him.
“That’s the budget for the whole picture!” he choked.
He was in no position to haggle, and neither was I. Viva Zapata! had made me
a star, and my stock was rising. Who knew how long I would be in demand?
The trick, in pictures, was to get your price while you could, and take what¬
ever you could get after that. It would be some time before I could make a
picture just for the hell of it.
“Tell you what,” he finally said. “I’ll give you twenty-five percent of the pic¬
ture.”
I looked across the table at Fellini and smiled. He must have really wanted
me for the role. No one had ever wanted me enough to give me a piece of the
picture. Plus, I liked him, and I liked the story.
“Fine,” I said, extending my hand. “Let’s make a picture.”
We very nearly had a deal, but for Dino De Laurentiis. I had not counted on
him, but he surfaced soon enough. I was under contract to Dino at the time,
and smack in the middle of the Attila shoot. Fellini wanted to begin production
right away. The only way around the conflict, I thought, was to get De Laurentiis
to bend a bit on his exclusivity clause, and to break my ass in the bargain.
I had it all figured out. In those days, Italian studios functioned under so-called
French hours, which meant we worked from noon to seven o’clock in the
evening, without breaking for lunch. Of course, the hours were sometimes
shifted to accommodate an exterior shot requiring morning light, or a tight dead¬
line, but the producers were usually good about sticking to the later schedule.
It was quite a civil change for the American actors accustomed to arriving on
the set by seven or eight in the morning, but the Europeans—bless them all!—
preferred to work later in the evening in exchange for a good night’s rest.
What the French hours meant for me, and Fellini, was that I would be able
Directors
J io
to play the part of Zampano if he could arrange to shoot La Strada in the morn¬
ings. It was not an ideal situation for him—the picture was to be shot almost
entirely outdoors, and he hated to give up all those daylight hours—but it was
better than nothing. And it would not be ideal for me, working virtually around
the clock for a stretch of several weeks, but I wanted to see if I was up to it.
It fell to me to extract De Laurentiis’s approval.
“Dino,” I explained, visiting him in his office the next morning. “I met a guy
named Fellini, and he wants to make a picture with me.”
“Fellini?” he said. “That no-talent? He’s so full of shit I can’t understand what
he’s saying. He wanted me to finance a picture of his, some nonsense about a
circus, or a strongman.”
“That’s it,” I said. ‘That’s the picture. That’s the one he wants meto make.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Tony. The man likes to put his wife in his pictures.”
I chose not to remind Dino that his own wife, Silvana Mangano, was a fix¬
ture in several De Laurentiis productions. “What’s wrong with that?” I asked in¬
stead. “I’ve worked with Giulietta before. She’s quite good.”
“She’s wrong for the part. I’d rather use Gina Lollobrigida in that part.”
He was talking like a producer. Gina Lollobrigida was wrong for Fellini’s pic¬
ture. “Look, Dino,” I said, “I want to make the picture. I’ll shoot that picture in
the mornings and come to work for you in the afternoons.”
“You can’t do that!” he blustered. “We have a contract!”
“We do. That’s why I’m here. I was hoping we could work something out.”
What we worked out was thatDe Laurentiis and Ponti would finance Fellini’s
picture, in order to keep a tight rein on my schedule. It cost them $2jo,ooo,
which was nothing next to the money they had already dropped on Attila. Plus,
I convinced them it was a good investment. And it was. Dino and Carlo made
millions on La Strada, and the picture established them as two of the most pow¬
erful producers on the international scene. Hell, it won them an Academy
Award, as best foreign language film, when it was finally released in the United
States in 1956, and as far as I know they never once thanked the director for his
vision, or any of the actors for their performances—or me, for persuading them
to invest in the picture in the first place.
But all of that was unimportant next to everything else. La Strada placed Fed¬
erico Fellini at the vanguard of the motion picture industry, and laid the ground¬
work for his extraordinary career. I squired him around Hollywood, after the
American release, helping him to shop for a studio deal. The studio heads were
leapfrogging each other to sign up the Italian auteur, offering him as much as a
million dollars for his next picture—a phenomenal sum in those days. I trans¬
lated for my friend.
“A million dollars,” Fellini said, incredulous. “What for?”
“For a picture. Just to direct a picture.”
Kenneth Tynan
5 i i
“No,” he finally said. “I can’t. I can’t direct an American picture. I would not
know how to tell an American actor how to hold his cigarette.”
La Strada vaulted me from respect as a supporting player to international
recognition. It might have made me a rich man too—if I had held on to my piece
of the picture. I had no idea the movie would have such an impact, even after it
was in the can. I arranged a special showing for my agent and several friends,
and when the lights came on in the screening room, everyone was scratching his
head. No one could understand it, and I was so convinced the picture would be
a flop that I let my agent sell my twenty-five percent stake for a lousy twelve
thousand dollars, turning one of the best deals of my life into one of the worst.
Even when the dice rolled my way, I crapped out.
Kenneth Tynan
Mel Brooks once came to my film class to speak. The students had just seen his great com¬
edy The Producers, and one of them told him he thought it was vulgar. "I would like
to explain something to you,” Brooks said. ‘This movie, it rises below vulgarity." Brooks
himself is such a funny man, so warm and engaging, that a documentary of his average
day might be more entertaining than some of his movies. Kenneth Tynan, with Harold
Hobson one of the two most influential British drama critics from the 1950s through the
flowering of the Angry Young Men, wrote a series of show business profiles for The New
Yorker. Here he records Brooks on just such an average day.
Mel Brooks
I draw on my journal for the following impressions of the Once and Future Five
at work (and play) on High Anxiety, a quintuple-threat Brooks movie in which
he functioned as producer, director, co-author, title-song composer, and star:
July 14, 1977: Arrive in Pasadena for the last day of shooting. By pure but
pleasing coincidence, location is named Brookside Park. Temperature ninety de-
Directors
S'2
grees, atmosphere smog-laden. Only performers present are Brooks, leaping
around in well-cut charcoal-gray suit with vest, and large flock of trained pigeons.
As at Mamma Leone’s, he is playing a psychiatrist. Sequence in rehearsal is par¬
ody of The Birds, stressing aspect of avian behavior primly ignored by Hitchcock:
Pigeons pursue fleeing Brooks across park, subjecting him to bombardment of
bird droppings. Spattered star seeks refuge in gardener’s hut, slams door, sinks
exhausted onto upturned garbage can. After momentary respite, lone white plop
hits lapel, harbinger of redoubled aerial assault through hole in roof. Brooks’s
hundred-yard dash is coveredby tracking camera, while gray-haired technicians
atop motorized crane mounted on truck squirt bird excreta (simulated by may¬
onnaise and chopped spinach) from height of thirty feet. Barry Levinson, one of
four collaborators on screenplay, observes to me, “We have enough equipment
here to put a man on the moon, and it’s all being used to put bird droppings on
Brooks.” After each of numerous trial runs and takes, pigeons obediently return
to their cages, putty in the hands of their trainer—“the same bird wrangler,”
publicity man tells me, “who was employed by Hitchcock himself.” Find manic
energy of Brooks, now fifty-one years old, awesome: by the time shot is satis¬
factorily in can, he will have sprinted, in this depleting heat, at least a mile, with¬
out loss of breath, ebullience, or directorial objectivity, and without taking a
moment’s break.
Each take is simultaneously recorded on videotape and instantly played back
on TV screen—a technique pioneered by Jerry Lewis—to be scrutinized by
Brooks, along with his fellow authors, Levinson, Rudy DeLuca, and Ron Clark,
who make comments ranging from condign approval to barbed derision. Dis¬
pelling myth that he is megalomaniac, Brooks listens persuadably to their sug¬
gestions, many of which he carries out. The writers, receiving extra pay as
consultants, have been with him throughout shooting, except for three weeks
when they went on strike for more money. Brooks coaxed them back by giving
up part of his own share of profits not only of High Anxiety but of Silent Movie,
on which he worked with same three authors. Main purpose of their presence
is not to rewrite—hardly a line has been changed or cut—but to offer pragmatic
advice. In addition, they all play supporting roles in picture. Later, as also hap¬
pened on Silent Movie, they will view first assembly of footage and help Brooks
with process of reducing it to rough-cut form. “Having us around keeps Mel on
his toes,” Levinson explains to me. “He likes to have constant feedback, and he
knows we won’t flatter him.” All of which deals telling blow to already obso¬
lescent auteur theory, whereby film is seen as springing fully armed from mind
of director. Good to find Brooks, who reveres writers, giving them place in sun:
he has often said that he became a director primarily in self-defense, to “protect
my vision”—i.e., the script as written. “There’s been no interference from the
front office,” Levinson continues, as Brooks trudges back to his mark for yet an¬
other charge through cloudburst of salad dressing. “Nobody from Fox has even
Kenneth Tynan
f i 3
come to see us. Mel has free rein. Jerry Lewis once had that kind of liberty, but
who has it now? Only Mel and, I guess, Woody Allen.”
Am reminded of remark made to me by Allen a few days earlier: “In Amer¬
ica, people who do comedy are traditionally left alone. The studios feel we’re
on a wavelength that’s alien to them. They believe we have access to some se¬
cret formula that they don’t. With drama, it’s different. Everybody thinks he’s
an expert.”
Writers and camera crew gather round tree-shaded monitor to watch replay
of latest take. Smothered in synthetic ordure, star bustles over to join them:
Brooks: I stare at life through fields of mayonnaise. (Wipes eyes with towel.)
Was it for this that I went into movies? Did I say to my mother, “I’m going to
be a big star, momma, and have birds shit on me”? I knew that in show business
people shit on you—but birds ! Some of this stuff is not mayonnaise, you know.
Those are real pigeons up there.
The take (last of twenty) is generally approved, and Brooks orders it printed.
Welcoming me to location, he expresses pleasure at hearing British accent,
adding, “I love the Old World. I love the courteous sound of the engines of Eng¬
lish cabs. I also love France and good wine and good food and good homosex¬
ual production designers. I believe all production designers should have a brush
stroke, a scintilla, of homosexuality, because they have to hang out with smart
people.” (Brooks once declared, in an interview with Playboy, that he loved Eu¬
rope so much that he always carried a photograph of it in his wallet. “Of course,”
he went on, “Europe was a lot younger then. It’s really not a very good picture.
Europe looks much better in person.” He lamented the factthathis beloved con¬
tinent was forever fighting: “I’ll be so happy when it finally settles down and
gets married.”)
Brooks’s version of shower scene from Psycho, shot several days before, now
appears on monitor. An unlikely stand-in for Janet Leigh, Brooks is seen in
bathrobe approaching fatal tub. Cut to closeup of feet as he daintily sheds san¬
dals, around which robe falls to floor. Next comes rear view of Brooks, naked
from head to hips, stepping into bath. Star watches himself entranced.
Brooks ( passionately ): When people see this, I want them to say, “He may be
just a small Jew, but I love him. A short little Hebrew man, but I’d follow him
to the ends of the earth.” I want every fag in L.A. to see it and say, “Willya look
at that back?”
Before lunch break, he takes opportunity to deliver speech of thanks to as¬
sembled crew, whose reactions show that they have relished working with him.
Recall another apposite quote from Woody Allen, who said to me in tones
of stunned unbelief, “I hear there’s a sense of enjoyment on Mel’s set. I hear the
people on his movies love the experience so much that they wish it could go on
forever. On my movies, they’re thrilled when it’s over.”
“As you all know,” Brooks begins, “you’ll never get an Academy Award with
j 14 Directors
me, because I make comedies.” This is a recurrent gripe. Brooks feels that film
comedy has never received, either from industry or from audience, respect it
deserves, and he is fond of pointing out that Chaplin got his 1971 Academy
Award “just for surviving,” not for The Gold Rush or City Lights.
Brooks ( continuing ): I want to say from my heart that you’re the best crew
I ever found. Of course, I didn’t look that hard. But you have been the most
fun, and the costliest. I wish to express my sincere hope that the next job you
get is— work.
Over lunch, consumed at long trestle tables under trees, he recounts—
between and sometimes during mouthfuls—how he visited Hitchcock to get his
blessings on High Anxiety.
Brooks: He’s a very emotional man. I told him that where other people take
saunas to relax, I run The Lady Vanishes, for the sheer pleasure of it. He had tears
in his eyes. I think he understood that I wasn’t going to make fun of him. If the
picture is a sendup, it’s also an act of homage to a great artist. I’m glad I met
him, because I love him. I love a lot of people that I want to meet so I can tell
them about it before they get too old. Fred Astaire, for instance. And Chaplin.
I’ve got to go to Switzerland and tell him—just a simple “Thank you,” you know?
[Chaplin died five months later, before this pilgrimage could be made.]
More Brooksian table talk, in response to student writing dissertation on his
work:
Student: What’s the best way to become a director?
Brooks: The royal road to direction used to be through the editing room.
Today my advice would be: write a few successful screenplays. Anybody can di¬
rect. There are only eleven good writers. In all of Hollywood. I can name you
many, many screenwriters who have gone on to become directors. In any movie,
they are the prime movers.
Student: Have you any ambition to make a straight dramatic film?
Brooks ( vehemently ): No! Why should I waste my good time making a straight
dramatic film? Sydney Pollack can do that. The people who can’t make you laugh
can do that. Suppose I became the Jean Renoir of America. What the hell would
be left for the other guys to do? I would take all their jobs away. It would be
very unfair of me.
Student: In other words, “Shoemaker, stick to your last”?
Brooks: Yes. And in Hollywood you’re only as good as your last last.
Student: But don’t you want to surprise your audience?
Brooks: Sure. Every time. I gave them Blazing Saddles, a Jewish Western with
a black hero, and that was a megahit. Then I gave them a delicate and private
film, Young Frankenstein, and that was a hit. Then I made Silent Movie, which I
thought was a brave and experimental departure. It turned out to be another
Mel Brooks hit. High Anxiety is the ultimate Mel Brooks movie. It has lunatic class.
Kenneth Tynan
S l S
Student: But what if you had a serious dramatic idea that really appealed to
you? Would you—
Brooks: Listen, there are one hundred and thirty-one viable directors of
drama in this country. There are only two viable directors of comedy. Because
in comedy you have to do everything the people who make drama do—create
plot and character and motive and so forth—and then, on top of that, be funny.
Unidentified bearded man: Have you ever thought of being funny onstage?
Brooks: No, because I might become this white-belted, white-shoed,
maroon-mohair-jacketed type who goes to Vegas and sprays Jew-jokes all over
the audience. A few years of that and I might end up going to England, like
George Raft or Dane Clark, wearing trench coats in B movies.
Debate ensues about differences (in style and personality) between Brooks
and the other “viable director of comedy,” Woody Allen. Both are New York
Jewish, both wrote for Sid Caesar, both are hypochondriacs, much influenced
by time spent in analysis. There is general agreement at table on obvious dis¬
tinction—that Brooks is extrovert and Allen introvert.
Barry Levinson : They’re total opposites. Mel is a peasant type. His films deal
with basic wants and greeds, like power and money. Woody’s films are about
inadequacies—especially sexual inadequacy—and frailty and vulnerability. Also,
like Chaplin, Woody is his own vehicle. His movies are like episodes from an
autobiography. You couldn’t say that about Mel.
Howard Rothberg (slim, dark-haired young man who has been Brooks’s personal
manager since 1975)' The big difference is that Mel’s appeal is more universal.
Blazing Saddles grossed thirty-five million domestically and Silent Movie is al¬
ready up to twenty million. Woody, on the other hand, appeals to a cult. I
love his pictures, but they have a box-office ceiling. They don’t go through
the roof.
Brooks ( who has been wolfing cannelloni, followed by ice cream): No matter how
much High Anxiety grosses, it won’t give me one more iota of freedom. I have
the freedom right now to do anything I want. My contract is with the public—
to entertain them, not just to make money out of them. I went into show busi¬
ness to make a noise, to pronounce myself I wantto go onmakingtheloudestnoise
to the most people. If I can’t do that, I’m not going to make a quiet, exquisite
noise for a cabal of cognoscenti.
This is Brooks the blusterer speaking, the unabashed attention-craver who
started out as a teenage timpanist and is still metaphorically beating his drum.
Can testify that drummer has alter ego, frequently silenced by the din: Brooks
the secret connoisseur, worshipper of good writing, and expert on the Russian
classics, with special reference to Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, and Tolstoy.
Is it possible that—to adapt famous aphorism by Cyril Connolly—inside every
Mel Brooks a Woody Allen is wildly signalling to be let out?
$i6 Directors
Student: I think your films are somehow more benevolent and affirmative
than Woody Allen’s.
Brooks: Let’s say I’m beneficent. I produce beneficial things. A psychiatrist
once told me he thought my psyche was basically very healthy, because it led to
product. He said I was like a great creature that gave beef or milk. I’m munifi¬
cent. I definitely feel kingly. Same kind of Jew as Napoleon.
Student: Napoleon was Jewish?
Brooks: Could have been. He was short enough. Also, he was very nervous
and couldn’t keep his hands steady. That’s why he always kept them under his
lapels. I put him in one of my records. [Fans will remember how the Two-
Thousand-Year-Old Man took a summer cottage on Elba, where he met the ex¬
iled Emperor on the beach—“a shrimp, used to go down by the water and
cry”—without at first realizing who he was: “The guy was in a bathing suit, how
did I know? There was no place to put his hands.”] Anyway, there’s something
disgustingly egotistical about me. I never truly felt inferior. I never developed
small defenses. I never ran scared. Even in comedy, you don’t want your hero
to be a coward. You want him to go forth and give combat, which is what I do
in High Anxiety. Now, Woody makes Fellini-ish, Truffaut-ish films. He starts out
with the idea of making art. He feels that his art is his life. And more power to
him. The difference is that if someone wants to call my movies art or crap, I
don’t mind.
Detect, once more, sound of obsessive drumbeating; last sentence, in par¬
ticular, seems intended to convince drummer himself as much as anyone else.
Conversation breaks off as Brooks returns to work. Hear him in distance invit¬
ing youthful assistant to take over direction of brief scene in gardener’s hut, al¬
ready rehearsed, where star is deluged anew with bird droppings—“a job,” he
graciously declares to the grinning apprentice, “fully commensurate with your
latent talents.”
Finishing my coffee, I mull over recent conversations with Gene Wilder, who
has been directed thrice by Brooks (in The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young
Frankenstein) and once by Allen (in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex
but Were Afraid to Ask). According to Wilder: “Working with Woody is what it
must be like to work with Ingmar Bergman. It’s all very hushed. You and I were
talking quietly now, but if we were on Woody’s set someone would already have
told us to keep our voices down. He said three things to me while we were shoot¬
ing—‘You know where to get tea and coffee?’ and ‘You know where to get
lunch?’ and ‘Shall I see you tomorrow?’ Oh, and there was one other thing: ‘If
you don’t like any of these lines, change them.’ Mel would never say that. The
way Woody makes a movie, it’s as if he was lighting ten thousand safety matches
to illuminate a city. Each one of them is a little epiphany, topical, ethnic, or po¬
litical. What Mel wants to do is set off atom bombs of laughter. Woody will
take a bow and arrow or a hunting rifle and aim it at small, precise targets. Mel
Kenneth Tynan
S 17
grabs a shotgun, loads it with fifty pellets, and points it in the general direction
of one enormous target. Out of fifty, he’ll score at least six or seven huge bull’s-
eyes, and those are what people always remember about his films. He can syn¬
thesize what audiences all over the world are feeling, and suddenly, at the right
moment, blurt it out. He’ll take a universal and crystallize it. Sometimes he’s
vulgar and unbalanced, but when those seven shots hit that target, I know that
little maniac is a genius. A loud kind of Jewish genius—maybe that’s as close as
you can get to defining him.”
This reminds me of something written in 1974 by the critic Andrew Sarris:
Allen’s filmmaking is more cerebral, and Brooks's more intuitive. In a strange
way, Brooks is more likable than Allen. Thus, even when Allen tries to do the
right thing, he seems very narrowly self-centered, whereas even when Mel Brooks
surrenders to the most cynical calculations—as he does so often in Blazing Sad¬
dles —he still spills over with emotional generosity. . . . What Allen lacks is the
reckless abandon and careless rapture of Brooks.
Reflect that this positive judgment is not necessarily incompatible with neg¬
ative opinion I have lately heard from former colleague of Brooks; viz., “Woody
has become a professional, whereas Mel is still a brilliant amateur. Amateurs are
people putting on parties with multimillion-dollar budgets.”
Return to set, where, after nearly twelve weeks’ shooting, current party is
over. Brooks has brought in picture—budgeted at four million dollars—four
days ahead of schedule. Though in buoyant mood, he expresses horror at rock¬
eting cost of filmmaking: “One actor and a few birds, but I’ll bet you this has
been a twenty-thousand-dollar day.” (Studio accounting department afterward
confirms that he would have won his bet.) I take my leave. Brooks clicks heels
and bows, saying, “Your obedient Jew.” He misses no opportunity to brandish
his Jewishness, which he uses less as a weapon than as a shield. Remember (he
seems to be pleading) that I must be liked, because it is nowadays forbidden to
dislike a Jew.
Manager Rothberg accompanies me to parking lot, explaininghow much suc¬
cess of movie means to Brooks. I suggest that surely he can afford to make a flop.
“Financially, he can,” Rothberg says. “Psychologically, he can’t.”
August 31, 1977: “My beloved, you are guinea pigs.” It is a balmy evening
seven weeks later, and Brooks is introducing first showing of rough-cut to au¬
dience of two hundred (including workers on picture, their friends and relations,
and minor studio employees such as waiters, cleaners, and parking attendants)
who have crowded into private theatre at Fox. He continues, “There are chil¬
dren present. Some of them may be mine, so I’m not going to do the filthy speech
that is customary on these occasions. For the nonce, by which I mean no offense,
this movie is called High Anxiety, a phrase that I hope will enter common par-
j i 8 Directors
lance and become part of the argot of Americana. But what you will see tonight
has no music, no sound effects, and no titles. You won’t even see our swirling
artwork. You will, however, see a lot of crayon lines, which I will explain for
the benefit of the editor. They indicate something called opticals. This picture
has one hundred and six dissolves, of which you will see not one. There are some
other very fancy opticals that I am having processed in Cairo right now. There
is also one crayon mark that should be on a men’s room wall, but we couldn’t
get it out in time. Asyou know, it’sincumbentonusalltobe killed ina Hitch¬
cock movie, and you will see several people being very tastefully slaughtered. 1
regret to tell you that in casting four crucial roles we ran out of money, so the
people who wrote the picture are in it. Finally, let me say that I wish you well,
but I wish myself better.”
Andy Wakhol and
Paul Hackett
It is amazing to recall, in these days of meticulously marketed big-budget blockbusters,
that there was once a time when not only did Andy Warhol make films, but they played
all over the country and ordinary moviegoers bought tickets to see them. Sex was the key;
at the moment in the 1960s when Warhol’s best-known films began to appear, people
would sit all the way through Chelsea Girls for even the promise of nudity, although
what was much more intriguing was the milieu itself. What Warhol was really making
were cinema verite documentaries about people who thought they were making a movie.
from POPism
The only thing “underground” about American underground movies—I mean,
in the strict political sense of having to hide from some authority—was that in
the early sixties there was the big censorship problem with nudity. The fifties
had been iobta-scandal time—even as late as ’^9 there was the big deal about
Grove Press publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover and later on about Henry Miller’s
A n d y Warhol and Paul Hackett
09
Tropic of Cancer. The censorship policies in this country have always completely
baffled me because there was never a time when you couldn’t walk into any 42nd
Street peep show and see all the cocks and cunts and tits and asses you wanted,
then suddenly out of the blue the courts would single out one popular movie
with a few racy scenes in it for “obscenity.”
Some underground filmmakers actually kind of hoped the police would seize
their movies so they’d get in all the papers for being persecuted for “freedom
of expression,” and that was always considered a worthy cause. But it was pretty
much a fluke who the police arrested and who they didn’t and after a certain
point it all got boring for everyone.
The first movie of mine that was seized was a two-minute-forty-five-second
one-reeler that I’d shot out in Old Lyme of everybody during the filming of Jack
Smith’s Normal Love —the one where the cast made a room-size cake and got on
top of it. Actually, it was seized by mistake—what the police were out to get
was Jack’s Flaming Creatures.
Jonas’s Coop had moved from the Gramercy Arts Theater to the building
Diane di Prima and some of the other poets used on St. Mark’s Place on the
southeast comer of the Bowery. After Flaming Creatures was seized, the screen¬
ings were stopped for a little while. Then Jonas rented the Writers Stage on 4th
Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery and he screened Genet’s Un
Chant d’amour there. “I knew that Jack’s would be a difficult case to fight,” Jonas
told me, “with nobody really knowing who he was, and I felt that Genet—for
the right or wrong reasons—would be a better case because he was a famous
writer. And I was right—when they clubbed us that time for obscenity, we won.”
After all the court cases Jonas realized that he needed some type of umbrella
nonprofit organization, so he created the Film Culture Non-Profit Organization,
which published Film Culture magazine and sponsored screenings and other
things. During that period they had screenings in “respectable” places—like that
Washington Square art gallery of Ruth Kligman’s—so they wouldn’t be closed
down again by the police. Ruth’s was where Jonas showed a lot of Marie
Menken’s films and in the fall we showed Blow Job there publicly for the first
time.
All through ’64 we filmed movies without sound. Movies, movies, and more
movies. We were shooting so many, we never even bothered to give titles to a
lot of them. Friends would stop by and they’d wind up in front of the camera,
the star of that afternoon’s reel.
Once [Emile De Antonio] started making movies, he never went back to the art
scene. In the past year we’d only seen each other a couple of times, at parties.
But then I bumped into him one afternoon on the street and we went to the Russ¬
ian Tea Room for a drink. We sat there gabbing about what we’d been doing,
J2o
Directors
and I offered that since we were both doing movies now, wouldn’t it be great
to do one together. Now, with people who know me, I’m famous for this sort
of thing—proposing collaborations. (I’m also famous for not spelling out what
the collaboration will consist of—who’ll do what—and lots of people have told
me how frustrating that can be. But the thing is, I never know exactly what I
want to do, and the way I see it, why worry about things like specifics before¬
hand, since nothing may ever come of the project? Do it first, then look at what
you’ve got, and then worry about who did what. But most people would dis¬
agree with me, saying it’s better to have an understanding at the outset.) When
I suggested doing some sort of a joint production to De, I was just being im¬
pulsive. But De was always so practical, he squelched my suggestion right away,
saying that our lives and styles and politics (I can’t remember if he was calling
himself a Marxist yet) and philosophies were just too different.
I must have looked very disappointed, because he held up his drink and said,
“Okay, Andy, I’ll do something for you that I’m sure nobody’s ever offered to
do for you and you can film it: I’ll drink an entire quart of Scotch whiskey in
twenty minutes.”
We went right over to 47th Street and made a seventy-minute film. De fin¬
ished the bottle before I reloaded at the halfway point, but he wasn’t showing
the liquor yet. However, in just the little while it took to put more film in the
camera, he was suddenly on the floor—singing and swearing and scratching at
the wall, the whole time trying to pull himself up and not being able to.
Now, the thing was, I didn’t really know what he’d meant when he told me,
“I’ll risk my life for you.” Even when I saw him crawling around on all fours, I
just thought of it simply as someone being really drunk. Then Rotten Rita, who
was hanging around, said, “Marine Corps sergeants keel over dead from that.
Your liver can’t take it.”
But De didn’t die, and I called the movie Drink so it could be a trilogy with
my Eat and Sleep. When the little old lady we used as a go-between brought it
back from the lab, I called De to come over and see it. He said, “I’m bringing
my woman and an English friend and I hope no one else will be there.” There
was no one at the Factory right then anyway, except for Billy and Gerard and
me and a couple of people who looked like they were on their way out. But as
soon as I hung up, a gang of Gerard’s friends happened to walk in, and by the
time De got there, there were around forty people all over the place. We ran
the film and after it was over, De said to me, “I’ll probably sue you if you ever
screen it publicly again.” I knew he’d never sue me, of course, but that was his
way of telling me not to have a print made of it.
At the end of ’64 we made Harlot, our first sound movie with sound— Empire,
the eight-hour shot of the Empire State Building, had been our first “sound”
Andy Warhol and Paul Hackett j2i
movie without sound. Now that we had the technology to have sound in our
movies, I realized that we were going to be needing a lot of dialogue. It’s funny
how you get the solution to things. Gerard and I were down at the Cafe Le Metro
for one of the Wednesday night poetry readings when a writer named Ronnie
Tavel was reading passages from his novel and some poems. He seemed to have
reams of paper around; I was really impressed with the sheer amount of stuff
he’d evidently written. While he was reading, I was thinking how wonderful it
was to find someone so prolific just at the point when we were going to need
“sounds” for our sound movies. Immediately after the reading I asked Ronnie if
he’d come by the Factory and just sit in a lounge chair off-camera and talk while
we shot Mario Montez in Harlot, and he said fine. As we left Le Metro, Gerard
sneered, “Your standards are really ridiculous sometimes.” I guess he thought I
was too impressed with the quantity of stuff Ronnie turned out. But the thing
was, I liked the content, too, I thought he was really talented.
Mario Montez, the star of Harlot, was in a lot of off-off-Broadway plays and doing
a lot of underground acting for Jack Smith and Ron Rice and Jose Rodriguez-
Soltero and Bill Vehr. And this was all in addition, he told me, to his regular
job: working for the post office. Mario was one of the best natural comedians
I’d ever met; he knew instinctively how to get a laugh every time. He had a nat¬
ural blend of sincerity and distraction, which has to be one of the great comedy
combinations.
A lot of Mario’s humor came from the fact that he adored dressing up like a
female glamour queen, yet at the same time he was painfully embarrassed about
being in drag (he got offended if you used that word—he called it “going into
costume”). He used to always say that he knew it was a sin to be in drag—he
was Puerto Rican and a very religious Roman Catholic. The only spiritual com-
fort he allowed himself was the logic that even though God surely didn ’ t like him
for going into drag, that still, if He really hated him, He would have struck him
dead.
Mario was a very sympathetic person, very benign, although he did get furi¬
ous at me once. We were watching a scene of his in a movie we called The
Fourteen-Year-Old Girl, and when he saw that I’d zoomed in and gotten a close-
up of his arm with all the thick, dark masculine hair and veins showing, he got
very upset and hurt and accused me in a proud Latin way, “I can see you were
trying to bring out the worst in me.”
Ronnie Tavel appeared for the Harlot shooting and he and a couple of other peo¬
ple just talked normally off-camera. Sometimes the talk was about what we were
shooting and other times it wasn’t—I loved the effect of having unrelated dia-
Directors
£22
logue. After that Ronnie did quite a few scenarios for us— The Life ofJuanita Cas¬
tro, Horse, Vinyl, The Fourteen-Year-Old Girl, Hedy (The Shoplifter), Lupe, Kitchen,
and others. I enjoyed working with him because he understood instantly when
I’d say things like “I want it simple andplasticand white.” Not everyone can think
in an abstract way, but Ronnie could.
We filmed a lot of movies over at Edie’s place on 63rd Street near Madison.
Things like the Beauty series that was just Edie with a series of beautiful boys,
sort of romping around her apartment, talking to each other—the idea was for
her to have her old boyfriends there while she interviewed new ones. All the
movies with Edie were so innocent when I think back on them, they had more
of a pajama-party atmosphere than anything else.
Edie was incredible on camera—just the way she moved. And she never
stopped moving for a second—even when she was sleeping, her hands were wide
awake. She was all energy—she didn’t know what to do with it when it came
to living her life, but it was wonderful to film. The great stars are the ones who
are doing something you can watch every second, even if it’s just a movement
inside their eye.
Whenever you went over to Edie’s, you felt like you were about to be ar¬
rested or something—there were always a lot of cops patrolling her block (they
were guarding some consulate across the street). When I first knew her, she had
a limousine and driver parked out front at all times, but after a little while, the
limo was gone. Then she stopped buying couture clothes. Someone told me that
she’d finally used up her whole trust fund and that from now on she was going
to have to live on five hundred dollars a month allowance from home.
But I still couldn’t figure out whether she really had money or not. She was
wearing dime-store T-shirts instead of designer clothes, but still it was a fabu¬
lous look that anyone would have wanted to have. And she was still picking up
the checks every night for everybody—she’d sign for everything every place we
went. But again, I couldn’t figure out if she knew the management or if some¬
body was paying all her bills or what. I mean, I couldn’t figure out if she was
the richest person I knew or the poorest. All I knew was that she never had any
cash on her, but then that’s a sign of being really rich.
I filmed a movie— Poor Little Rich Girl —of Edie talking about being a debu¬
tante who’d just spent her inheritance—talking on the phone, walking back to
her bed, showing off the white mink coat that was her trademark.
I always wanted to do a movie of a whole day in Edie’s life. But then, that
was what I wanted to do with most people. I never liked the idea of picking out
certain scenes and pieces of time and putting them together, because then it ends
up being different from what really happened—it’s just not like life, it seems
Andy Warhol and Paul Hackett
so corny. What I liked was chunks of time all together, every real moment.
Somebody once asked Mario Montez what working with me was like, did I “re¬
hearse” the actors, etc., and Mario told them that since rehearsing was related
to editing, naturally someone who wouldn’t edit his movies wouldn’t rehearse
them either. That was exactly right. I only wanted to find great people and let
them be themselves and talk about what they usually talked about and I’d film
them for a certain length of time and that would be the movie. In those days we
were using Ronnie Tavel scripts for some of the movies, and for others we just
had an idea or a theme that we gave people to work with. To play the poor lit¬
tle rich girl in the movie, Edie didn’t need a script—if she’d needed a script,
she wouldn’t have been right for the part.
During the summer and fall, Edie started saying she was unhappy being in un¬
derground movies. One night she asked Mel and me to meet her at the Russian
Tea Room for a “conference.” She wanted him to arbitrate while she explained
to me how she felt about her career. That was one of her standard ploys—
getting everyone involved in whether she should do this or that. And you really
did get involved. That night she said she’d decided that she definitely was going
to quit doing movies for the Factory.
Jonas Mekas had just offered us a lot of consecutive nights’ screenings at the
Cinematheque to do whatever we wanted with, and we thought it would be fab¬
ulous to have an Edie Sedgwick Retrospective—meaning, all of her films from
the last eight months. When we’d first thought of it, we all thought it was hi¬
larious, including Edie. In fact, I think Edie was the one who thought of it. But
now, this night at dinner, she was claiming that we only wanted to make a fool
out of her. The waiter moved the Moscow Mules aside and put our dinners
down, but Edie pushed the plate aside and lit up a cigarette.
“Everybody in New York is laughing at me,” she said. “I’m too embarrassed
to even leave my apartment. These movies are making a complete fool out of
me! Everybody knows I just stand around in them doing nothing and you film
it and what kind of talent is that? Try to imagine how I feel!” Mel reminded her
that she was the envy of every girl in New York at that moment, which she ab¬
solutely was—I mean, everybody was copying her look and her style.
Then she attacked the idea of the Edie Retrospective specifically, saying that
it was just another way for us to make a fool out of her. By now I was getting
red in the face; she was making me so upset I could hardly talk.
I told her, “But don’t you understand ? These movies are art!” (Mel told me
later that he was floored when he heard me say that: “Because your usual posi¬
tion was to let other people say that your movies were works of art,” he said,
“but not to say it yourself.”) I tried to make her understand that if she acted in
J24
Directors
enough of these underground movies, a Hollywood person might see her and
put her in a big movie—that the important thing was just to be up there on the
screen and let everybody see how good she was. But she wouldn’t accept that.
She insisted we were out to make a fool of her.
The funny thing about all this was that the whole idea behind making those
movies in the first place was to be ridiculous. I mean, Edie and I both knew they
were a joke—that was why we were doing them! But now she was saying that
if they really were ridiculous, she didn’t want to be in them. She was driving
me nuts. I kept reminding her that any publicity was good publicity. Then,
around midnight, I was so crazy from all the dumb arguing that I walked out.
Mel and Edie stayed up talking until dawn, and finally she made some sort of
“decision.” “But you could never expect anything too systematic from Edie’s
thinking,” Mel told me later, “because the next afternoon when I called her,
everything she’d ‘decided’ was all changed around.”
That was essentially the problem with Edie: the mood shifts and the mind
changes. Of course, all the drugs she was taking by now had a lot to do with
that.
Anyway, she did make some more movies with us.
All that summer we were shooting the short interior sequences that we later
combined to make up Chelsea Girls, using all the people who were around. A lot
of them were staying at the Hotel Chelsea, so we were spending a lot of time
over there. Often, we’d have dinner and sangria at the El Quixote Restaurant
downstairs and everybody would be coming and going back and forth from their
own rooms or somebody else’s. I got the idea to unify all the pieces of these peo¬
ple’s lives by stringing them together as if they lived in different rooms in the
same hotel. We didn’t actually film all the sequences at the Chelsea; some we
shot down where the Velvets were staying on West 3rd, and some in other
friends’ apartments, and some at the Factory—but the idea was they were all
characters that were around and could have been staying in the same hotel.
Everybody went right on doing what they ’ d always done—being themselves
(or doing one of their routines, which was usually the same thing) in front of
the camera. I once heard Erie telling someone about the direction I gave him for
his first scene. “Andy just told me to tell the story of my life and to somewhere
along the line take off all my clothes.” After thinking for a second, he added,
“And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.” Their lives became part of my
movies, and of course the movies became part of their lives; they’d get so into
them that pretty soon you couldn’t really separate the two, you couldn’t tell
the difference—and sometimes neither could they. During the filming of Chelsea
Girls, when Ondine slapped Pepper in his sequence as the Pope, it was so for
Andy Warhol and Paul H ackett
real that I got upset and had to leave the room—but I made sure I left the cam¬
era running. This was something new. Up until this, when people had gotten
violent during any of the filmings, I’d always turned the camera off and told them
to stop, because physical violence is something I just hate to see happen, unless,
of course, both people like it that way. But now I decided to get it all down on
film, even if I had to leave the room.
Poor Mario Montez got his feelings hurt for real in his scene where he found
two boys in bed together and sang “They Say That Falling in Love Is Wonder¬
ful” for them. He was supposed to stay there in the room with them for ten min¬
utes, but the boys on the bed insulted him so badly that he ran out in six and we
couldn’t persuade him to go back in to finish up. I kept directing him, “You were
terrific, Mario. Get back in there—just pretend you forgot something, don’t
let them steal the scene, it’s no good without you,” etc., etc. Buthe just wouldn’t
go back in, he was too upset.
Jack Smith always said that Mario was his favorite underground actor because
he could instantly capture the sympathy of the audience. And that was certainly
true. He lived in constant fear that his family or the people in the civil service
job where he worked would discover that he dressed up in drag. He told me
that every night he prayed in his little apartment on the Lower East Side for him -
self and his parents and f or all the dead celebrities that he loved, like “Linda Dar¬
nell and James Dean and Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Dandridge.”
Mario had that classic comedy combination of seeming dumb but being able
to say the right things with perfect timing; just when you thought you were laugh¬
ing at him, he’d turn it all around. (A lot of the superstars had that special qual¬
ity.)
For her reel in Chelsea Girls, Brigid played the Duchess. She got so into the
role that she started to think she really was a big dope dealer: she took a dirty
hypodermic needle and jabbed Ingrid in the fanny. (The Duchess wouldn’t have
done it any better herself.) Then, as we filmed, she picked up the phone and
called a lot of real people up (who had no idea they were part of her movie scene)
telling them about all the drugs she had for sale. She was so believable that the
hotel operators, who were always listening in, called the police. They arrived
at the room while we were still filming and searched everyone, but all they could
come up with was two Desoxyn pills. Still, after people saw Brigid in the movie,
they were as scared of her as they were of the Duchess.
While I was in the hospital [after being shot by Valerie Solanas], Paul gave me
reports on the local filming of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. Before I was
shot, they’d asked me to play the Underground Filmmaker in the big party scene,
and I’d suggested Viva for the part instead. They liked the idea of that. And then
J26
Directors
John Schlesinger had asked Paul to make an “underground movie” to be shown
during the “underground party” scene, so Paul went and filmed Ultra for that.
Then the casting agent had asked Paul to round up a lot of people we knew—
the kids around Max’s—to be day players and extras. I felt like I was missing a
big party, lying there in the hospital like that, but everybody kept me up to the
minute on what was happening, they were all so excited about being in a Hol¬
lywood movie.
I had the same jealous feeling thinking about Midnight Cowboy that I had had when
I saw Hair and realized that people with money were taking the subject matter
of the underground, counterculture life and giving it a good, slick, commercial
treatment. What we’d had to offer—originally, I mean—was a new, freer con¬
tent and a look at real people, and even though our films weren’t technically
polished, right up through ’67 the underground was one of the only places peo¬
ple could hear about forbidden subjects and see realistic scenes of modem life.
But now that Hollywood—and Broadway, too—was dealing with those same
subjects, things were getting a little confused: before, the choice had been like
between black and white, and now it was like between black and gray. I real¬
ized that with both Hollywood and the underground making films about male
hustlers—even though the two treatments couldn’t have been more differ¬
ent—it took away a real drawing card from the underground, because people
would rather go see the treatment that looked better. It was much less threat¬
ening. (People do tend to avoid new realities; they’d rather just add details to
the old ones. It’s as simple as that.) I kept feeling, “They’re moving into our ter¬
ritory.” It made me more than ever want to get money from Hollywood to do
a beautiful-looking and -sounding movie with our own attitude, so at last we
could compete equally. I was so jealous: I thought, “Why didn’t they give us the
money to do, say, Midnight Cowboy ? We would have done it so real for them.” I
didn’t understand then that when they said they wanted real life, they meant
real movie life!
“Isn’t it amazing?” Paul said on the phone one night while I was still in the
hospital. “Hollywood’s just gotten around to doing a movie about a 42nd Street
male hustler, and we did ours in ’6j. And there are all our great New York peo¬
ple sitting ont/ieirset all day—Geraldine, Joe, Ondine, Pat Ast, Taylor, Candy,
Jackie, Geri Miller, Patti D’Arbanville—and they never even get around to using
them. . . .”
“What’s Dustin like?” I asked.
“Oh, he’s very nice.”
“And Jon Voight?”
“He’s very nice, too. . . . So’s Brenda Vaccaro,” he said, absently. “They’re
Andrei Tarkovsky
527
all very nice.” Then he laughed, remembering Sylvia Miles. “And Sylvia’s ab¬
solutely indomitable. A force of nature.”
I got the feeling that making that little film of Ultra and then just hanging
around a movie set watching the production had been pretty frustrating for
Paul—he thought he should be out there doing a film himself. After all, he’d
done his own films before he came to the Factory.
“Well, you know,” I said, “maybe we did our film too early. Maybe now is
the smart time to do a film about a male hustler. Why don’t you do another
one—this time it can be in color.”
“That’s what I was sort of thinking,” Paul admitted.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky’s movies come as close as the cinema probably can come to providing transcen¬
dent experiences. The bell-casting sequence in Andrei Rublev is one of the greatest sus¬
tained pieces offilm 1 have ever seen, and his Solaris, Nostalgia, and The Sacrifice are
visionary works. But he was a very serious man. A few years before he died, Tarkovsky
(1932—1986) was honored at the Telluride Film Festival. 1 will never for get his speech
after he had been presented with the Telluride Medal. Rugged in the new Levi’s and west¬
ern shirt he'd purchased in Las Vegas, on the drive to Colorado, he stepped to the front of
the stage, and as he spoke, his Russian was translated by the Polish director Krzyzstof
Zanussi: "The cinema, she is a whore. First she charge a nickel, now she charge five dol¬
lars. Until she learn to give it away free, she will always be a whore. ” Wild applause. The
next night the Telluride Medal was presented to Richard Widmark, who stepped to the
front of the stage, cocked an eye at the audience, and said, “I’d like to name some pimps.
Griffith, Chaplin, Hitchcock, Welles. ...”
from Sculpting in Time
I should not want to impose my views on cinema on anybody else. All I hope is
that everyone I am addressing (in other words, people who know and love the
*28
Directors
cinema) has his own ideas, his particular view of the artistic principles of film-
making and film criticism.
A mass of preconceptions exists in and around the profession. And I do mean
preconceptions, not traditions: those hackneyed ways of thinking, cliches, that
grow up around traditions and gradually take them over. And you can achieve
nothing in art unless you are free from received ideas. You have to work out
your own position, your individual point of view—subject always, of course,
to common sense—and keep this before you, like the apple of your eye, all the
time you are working.
Directing starts not when the script is being discussed with the writer, nor
during work with the actor, or with the composer, but at the time when, be¬
fore the interior gaze of the person making the film and known as the director,
there emerges an image of the film: this might be a series of episodes worked
out in detail, or perhaps the consciousness of an aesthetic texture and emotional
atmosphere, to be materialised on the screen. The director must have a clear
idea of his objectives and work through with his camera team to achieve their
total, precise realisation. However, all this is no more than technical expertise.
Although it involves many of the conditions necessary to art, in itself it is not
sufficient to earn for the director the name of artist.
He starts to be an artist at the moment when, in his mind or even on film,
his own distinctive system of images starts to take shape—his own pattern of
thoughts about the external world—and the audience are invited to judge it, to
share with the director in his most precious and secret dreams. Only when his
personal viewpoint is brought in, when he becomes a kind of philosopher, does
he emerge as an artist, and cinema—as an art. (Of course he is a philosopher
only in a relative sense. As Paul Valery observed, “Poets are philosophers. You
might equally well compare the painter of sea-scapes to a ship’s captain.”)
Every art form, however, is bom and lives according to its particular laws.
When people talk about the specific norms of cinema, it is usually in juxtaposi¬
tion with literature. In my view it is all-important that the interaction between
cinema and literature should be explored and exposed as completely as possi¬
ble, so that the two can at last be separated, never to be confused again. In what
ways are literature and cinema similar and related? What links them?
Above all the unique freedom enjoyed by practitioners in both fields to take
what they want of what is offered by the real world, and to arrange it in sequence.
This definition may appear too wide and general, but it seems to me to take in
all that cinema and literature have in common. Beyond it lie irreconcilable dif¬
ferences, stemming from the essential disparity between word and screened
image: for the basic difference is that literature uses words to describe the
world, whereas film does not ha ve to use words: it manif ests itself to us directly.
In all these years no single binding definition has been found for the specific
Andrei T a rko v sky
S*9
character of cinema. A great many views exist, either in conflict with each
other, or worse—overlapping in a kind of eclectic confusion. Every artist in the
film world will see, pose and solve the problem in his own way. In any case there
has to be a clear specification if one is to work in the full consciousness of what
one is doing, for it is not possible to work without recognising the laws of one’s
own art form.
What are the determining factors of cinema, and what emerges from them?
What are its potential, means, images—not only formally, but even spiritually?
And in what material does the director work?
I still cannot forget that work of genius, shown in the last century, the film
with which it all started— L’Arrivee d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat. That film made
by Auguste Lumiere was simply the result of the invention of the camera, the
film and the projector. The spectacle, which only lasts half a minute, shows a
section of railway platform, bathed in sunlight, ladies and gentlemen walking
about, and the train coming from the depths of the frame and heading straight
for the camera. As the train approached panic started in the theatre: people
jumped up and ran away. That was the moment when cinema was bom; it was
not simply a question of technique, or just a new way of reproducing the world.
What came into being was a new aesthetic principle.
For the first time in the history of the arts, in the history of culture, man found
the means to take an impression of time. And simultaneously the possibility of re¬
producing that time on screen as often as he wanted, to repeat it and go back to
it. He acquired a matrix for actual time. Once seen and recorded, time could now
be preserved in metal boxes over a long period (theoretically for ever).
That is the sense in which the Lumiere films were the first to contain the seed
of a new aesthetic principle. But immediately afterwards cinema turned aside
from art, forced down the path that was safest from the point of view of philis¬
tine interest and profit. In the course of the following two decades almost the
whole of world literature was screened, together with a huge number of the¬
atrical plots. Cinema was exploited for the straightforward and seductive pur¬
pose of recording theatrical performance. Film took a wrong turn; and we have
to accept the fact that the unfortunate results of that move are still with us. The
worst of it was not, in my view, the reduction of cinema to mere illustration:
far worse was the failure to exploit artistically the one precious potential of the
cinema—the possibility of printing on celluloid the actuality of time.
In what form does cinema print time? Let us define it as factual. And fact can
consist of an event, or a person moving, or any material object; and furthermore
the object can be presented as motionless and unchanging, in so far as that im¬
mobility exists within the actual course of time.
That is where the roots are to be sought of the specific character of cinema.
Of course in music too the problem of time is central. Here, however, its so-
Directors
S 3 °
lution is quite different: the life force of music is materialised on the brink of its
own total disappearance. But the virtue of cinema is that it appropriates time,
complete with that material reality to which it is indissolubly bound, and which
surrounds us day by day and hour by hour.
Time, printed in its factual forms and manifestations: such is the supreme idea of
cinema as an art, leading us to think about the wealth of untapped resources in
film, about its colossal future. On that idea I build my working hypotheses, both
practical and theoretical.
Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room
where, for two hours, they watch the play of shadows on a sheet? The search
for entertainment? The need for a kind of drug? All over the world there are,
indeed, entertainment firms and organisations which exploit cinema and tele¬
vision and spectacles of many other kinds. Our starting-point, however, should
not be there, but in the essential principles of cinema, which have to do with
the human need to master and know the world. I think that what a person nor¬
mally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He
goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances
and concentrates a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it
longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: “stars,” story-lines and
entertainment have nothing to do with it.
Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese was the greatest of the American directors who came out of the exciting
late 1960s, and in the high level of his work and the persistence of his personal vision he
remains in the lead. No one else can point to such an astonishing filmography. Mean
Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas will be treasured as long as film
exists, and he has never, in my opinion, made a bad film (although Boxcar Bertha is
good primarily in the way it transcends or eludes the conditions of its making). Yet his
career has not been easy, and on one occasion he told me he thought it was over: "No one
will finance another one of my films. “His most fruiful collaborations have been with the
actor Robert De Niro, the editor Thelma Schoonmaker (whose husband, the British di¬
rector Michael Powell, was Scorsese’s hero), and the writer Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver,
Martin Scorsese £31
Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ). Here Scorsese describes the conditions
under which he collaborated with De Niro and Schrader on Taxi Driver, which was the
bestfilm of the 1970s, just as Raging Bull was the bestfilm of the 1980s.
from Scorsese on Scorsese
Brian De Palma introduced me to Paul Schrader. We made a pilgrimage out to
see Manny Farber, the critic, in San Diego. I wanted Paul to do a script of The
Gambler by Dostoevsky for me. But Brian took Paul out for dinner, and they con¬
trived it so that I couldn’t find them. By the time I tracked them down, three
hours later, they’d cooked up the idea of Obsession. But Brian told me that Paul
had this script, Taxi Driver, that he didn’t want to do or couldn’t do at that time,
and wondered if I’d be interested in reading it. So I read it and my friend read
it and she said it was fantastic: we agreed that this was the kind of picture we
should be making.
That year, 1971, De Niro was about to win the Academy Award for The God¬
father Part II, Ellen Burstyn won the Award for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,
and Paul had sold The Yakuza to Warner Brothers, so it was all coming together.
Michael and Julia Phillips, who owned the script, had won an Award for The Sting
and figured there was enough power to get the film made, though in the end we
barely raised the very low budget of $1.3 million. In fact, for a while we even
thought of doing it on black and white videotape! Certainly we felt it would be
a labour of love rather than any kind of commercial success—shoot very quickly
in New York, finish it in Los Angeles, release it and then bounce back into New
York, New York, on which we’d already begun pre-production. De Niro’s sched¬
ule had to be rearranged anyway, because he was due to film 1900 with
Bertolucci.
Much of Taxi Driver arose from my feeling that movies are really a kind of
dream-state, or like taking dope. And the shock of walking out of the theatre
into broad daylight can be terrifying. I watch movies all the time and I am also
very bad at waking up. The film was like that for me—that sense of being al¬
most awake. There’s a shot in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle is talking on the
phone to Betsy and the camera tracks away from him down the long hallway and
there’s nobody there. That was the first shot I thought of in the film, and it was
the last I filmed. I like it because I sensed that it added to the loneliness of the
whole thing, but I guess you can see the hand behind the camera there.
The whole film is very much based on the impressions I have as a result of
growing up in New York and living in the city. There’s a shot where the cam-
S3 2 Directors
era is mounted on the hood of the taxi and it drives past the sign “Fascination,”
which is just down from my office. It’s that idea of being fascinated, of this aveng¬
ing angel floating through the streets of the city, that represents all cities for me.
Because of the low budget, the whole film was drawn out on storyboards, even
down to medium close-ups of people talking, so that everything would connect.
I had to create this dream-like quality in those drawings. Sometimes the char¬
acter himself is on a dolly, so that we look over his shoulder as he moves to¬
wards another character, and for a split second the audience would wonder what
was happening. The overall idea was to make it like a cross between a Gothic
horror and the New York Daily News.
There is something about the summertime in New York that is extraordinary.
We shot the film during a very hot summer and there’s an atmosphere at night
that’s like a seeping kind of virus. You can smell it in the air and taste it in your
mouth. It reminds me of the scene in The Ten Commandments portraying the killing
of the first-bom, where a cloud of green smoke seeps along the palace floor and
touches the foot of a first-bom son, who falls dead. That’s almost what it’s like:
a strange disease creeps along the streets of the city and, while we were shoot¬
ing the film, we would slide along after it. Many times people threatened us and
we had to take off quickly. One night, while we were shooting in the garment
district, my father came out of work and walked by the set. The press of bod¬
ies on the pavement was so thick that, in the moment I turned away from the
camera to talk to him, it was impossible to get back. That was typical.
As in my other films, there was some improvisation in Taxi Driver. The scene
between De Niro and Cybill Shepherd in the coffee-shop is a good example. I
didn’t want the dialogue as it appeared in the script, so we improvised for about
twelve minutes, then wrote it down and shot it. It was about three minutes in
the end. Many of the best scenes, like the one in which De Niro says, “Suck on
this,” and blasts Keitel, were designed to be shot in one take. Although every
shot in the picture had been drawn beforehand, with the difficulties we en¬
countered, including losing four days of shooting because of rain, a lot of the
stuff taken from the car had to be shot as documentary.
We looked at Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man for the moves when Henry Fonda
goes into the insurance office and the shifting points of view of the people be¬
hind the counter. That was the kind of paranoia that I wanted to employ. And
the way Francesco Rosi used black and white in Salvatore Giuliano was the way
I wanted Taxi Driver to look in colour. We also studied Jack Hazan’s A Bigger
Splash for the head-on framing, such as the shot of the grocery store before Travis
Bickle shoots the black guy. Each sequence begins with a shot like that, so be¬
fore any moves you’re presented with an image like a painting.
I don’t think there is any difference between fantasy and reality in the way
these should be approached in a film. Of course, if you live that way you are
Martin Scorsese
Sii
clinically insane. But I can ignore the boundary on film. In Taxi Driver Travis
Biclde lives it out, he goes right to the edge and explodes. When I read Paul’s
script, I realized that was exactly the way I felt, that we all have those feelings,
so this was a way of embracing and admitting them, while saying I wasn’t happy
about them. When you live in a city, there’s a constant sense that the buildings
are getting old, things are breaking down, the bridges and the subway need re¬
pairing. At the same time society is in a state of decay; the police force are not
doing their job in allowing prostitution on the streets, and who knows if they’re
feeding off it and making money out of it. So that sense of frustration goes in
swings of the pendulum, only Travis thinks it’s not going to swing back unless
he does something about it. It was a way of exorcizing those feelings, and I have
the impression that De Niro felt that too.
I never read any of Paul’s source materials—I believe one was Arthur Bre¬
mer’s diary. But I had read Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground some years be¬
fore and I’d wanted to make a film of it; and Taxi Driver was the closest thing to
it I’d come across. De Niro had tried his hand at scriptwriting on the subject of
a political assassin, and he’d told me the story. We weren’t very close at this
time, I’d just worked with him on Mean Streets, but he read the script and said
it was very similar to his idea, which he therefore might as well drop. So we all
connected with this subject.
Travis really has the best of intentions; he believes he’s doing right, just like
St. Paul. He wants to clean up life, clean up the mind, clean up the soul. He is
very spiritual, but in a sense Charles Manson was spiritual, which doesn’t mean
that it’s good. It’s the power of the spirit on the wrong road. The key to the
picture is the idea of being brave enough to admit having these feelings, and then
act them out. I instinctively showed that the acting out was not the way to go,
and this created even more ironic twists to what was going on.
It was crucial to Travis Bickle’s character that he had experienced life and
death around him every second he was in south-east Asia. That way it becomes
more heightened when he comes back; the image of the street at night reflected
in the dirty gutter becomes more threatening. I think that’s something a guy
going through a war, any war, would experience when he comes back to what
is supposedly “civilization.” He’d be more paranoid. I’ll never forget a story my
father told me about one of my uncles coming back from the Second World War
and walking in the street. A car backfired and the guy just instinctively ran two
blocks! So Travis Bickle was affected by Vietnam: it’s held in him and then it
explodes. And although at the end of the film he seems to be in control again,
we give the impression that any second the time bomb might go off again.
It wasn’t easy getting Bernard Herrmann to compose the music for Taxi Dri¬
ver. He was a marvellous, but crotchety old man. I remember the first time I
called him to do the picture. He said it was impossible, he was very busy, and
£34
Directors
then asked what it was called. I told him and he said, “Oh, no, that’s not my
kind of picture title. No, no, no.” I said, “Well, maybe we can meet and talk
about it.” He said, “No, I can’t. What’s it about?” So I described it and he said,
“No, no, no. I can’t. Who’s in it?” So I toldhim andhe said, “No, no, no. Well,
I suppose we could have a quick talk.” Working with him was so satisfying that
when he died, the night he had finished the score, on Christmas Eve in Los An¬
geles, I said there was no one who could come near him. You get to know what
you like if you see enough films, and I thought his music would create the per¬
fect atmosphere for Taxi Driver.
I was shocked by the way audiences took the violence. Previously I’d been
surprised by audience reaction to The Wild Bunch, which I first saw in a Warner
Brothers screening room with a friend and loved. But a week later I took some
friends to see it in a theatre and it was as if the violence became an extension of
the audience and vice versa. I don’t think it was all approval, some of it must
have been revulsion. I saw Taxi Driver once in a theatre, on the opening night, I
think, and everyone was yelling and screaming at the shoot-out. When I made
it, I didn’t intend to have the audience react with that feeling. “Yes, do it! Let’s
go out and kill.” The idea was to create a violent catharsis, so that they’d find
themselves saying, “Yes, kill”; and then afterwards realize, “My God, no”—like
some strange Californian therapy session. That was the instinct I went with, but
it’s scary to hear what happens with the audience.
All around the world people have told me this, even in China. I was there
for a three-week seminar and there was a young Mongolian student who spoke
some English following me around Peking; and he would talk about Taxi Driver
all the time. He said, “You know, I’m very lonely,” and I’d say, “Yes, basically
we all are.” Then he said, “You dealt with loneliness very well,” and I thanked
him. Then he’d come round again and ask me, “What do I do with the loneli¬
ness?” He wasn’t just weird, he was a film student who was really interested. I
said, “Very often I try to put it into the work.” So a few days later he came back
and said, “I tried putting it into the work, but it doesn’t go away.” I replied, “No,
it doesn’t go away, there’s no magic cure.”
People related to the film very strongly in terms of loneliness. I never real¬
ized what that image on the poster did for the film—a shot of De Niro walking
down the street with the line, “In every city there’s one man.” And we had
thought that audiences would reject the film, feeling that it was too unpleasant
and no one would want to see it!
I wanted the violence at the end to be as if Travis had to keep killing all these
people in order to stop them once and for all. Paul saw it as a kind of Samurai
“death with honour”—that’s why De Niro attempts suicide—and he felt that if
he’d directed the scene, there would have been tons of blood all over the walls,
a more surrealistic effect. What I wanted was a Daily News situation, the sort
Martin Scorsese
S 3 S
you read about every day: “Three men killed by lone man who saves young girl
from them.” Bickle chooses to drive his taxi anywhere in the city, even the worst
places, because it feeds his hate.
I was thinking about the John Wayne character in The Searchers. He doesn’t
say much, except “That’ll be the day” (from which Buddy Holly did the song).
He doesn’t belong anywhere, since he’s just fought in a war he believed in and
lost, but he has a great love within him that’s been stamped out. He gets car¬
ried away, so that during the long search for the young girl, he kills more buf¬
falo than necessary because it’s less food for the Comanche—but, throughout,
he’s determined that they’ll find her, as he says, “as sure as the turning of the
Earth.”
Paul was also very influenced by Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. I admire his films
greatly, but I find them difficult to watch. In Pickpocket there’s a wonderful se¬
quence of the pickpockets removing wallets with their hands, a lot of movement
in and out, and it’s the same with Travis, alone in the room practising with his
guns. I felt he should talk to himself while doing this, and it was one of the last
things we shot, in a disused building in one of the roughest and noisiest areas of
New York. I didn’t want it to be like other mirror sequences we’d seen, so while
Bob kept saying, “Are you talking to me?” I just kept telling him, “Say it again.”
I was on the floor wearing headphones and I could hear a lot of street noise, so
I thought we wouldn’t get anything, but the track came out just fine.
I was also very much influenced by a film called Murder by Contract (1958),
directed by Irving Lemer, who worked on New York, New York as an editor and
to whom the film was dedicated following his death. I saw Murder by Contract on
the bottom half of a double bill with The Journey, and the neighbourhood guys
constantly talked about it. It had a piece of music that was like a theme, pat¬
terned rather like The Third Man, which came round and round again. But above
all, it gave us an inside look into the mind of a man who kills for a living, and it
was pretty frightening. I had even wanted to put a clip of it into Mean Streets, the
sequence in a car when the main character describes what different sizes of bul¬
let do to people, but the point had really been made. Of course, you find that
scene done by me in Taxi Driver.
Spike Lee
Fewfilms have ever shaken me as much as Do the Right Thing did when I saw it in May
1989 at the Cannes Film Festival. In its portrait of a summer day on a single big city
block, it evoked so many of the prejudices, misunderstandings, old wounds, and recent hurts
that contribute to the lack of communication between the races in America. What struck
me most about Lee’sfilm was its fairness; it was not an antiwhitefilm, a knee-jerk attack
on racism, but a car fully developed, considered, brilliantly written portrait of the peo¬
ple who lived on that city street and the forces that built up in them on that day. It is pos¬
sible, 1 believe, for a viewer of any race to identify with any of thefilm’s characters. Spike
Lee’s work as a whole has been more perceptive and usef ul than any other single cinematic
source in helping us understand the situation of the races in modern America. Flere, in
entries from notebooks he kept during the development of Do the Right Thing, he writes
about how some of his ideas developed.
from Do the Right Thing
December 2 £, 1987
It’s nine in the morning and I’m sitting down to get started on my next project,
Do the Right Thing. I hope to start shooting next August. I want the film to take
place over the course of one day, the hottest day of the year, in Brooklyn, New
York. The film has to look hot, too. The audience should feel like it’s suffocat¬
ing, like In the Heat of the Night.
I’ll have to kick butt to pull things together by August. If I’m not happy
with the script, I’ll hold off until the following summer. It’s better to go at it
right away, though, like Oliver Stone did by following Platoon with Wall Street.
I want most of the film to take place on one block. So, I need to scout a block
Spike Lee
53 7
in Brooklyn with vicious brownstones. We can build sets for the interiors, but
most scenes will take place in the street and on stoops and fire escapes.
It’s been my observation that when the temperature rises beyond a certain
point, people lose it. Little incidents can spark major conflicts. Bump into some¬
one on the street and you’re liable to get shot. A petty argument between hus¬
band and wife can launch a divorce proceeding. The heat makes everything
explosive, including the racial climate of the city. Racial tensions in the city are
high as it is, but when the weather is hot, forget about it. This might be the core
of a vicious climax for the film.
This block is in a Black neighborhood in Brooklyn. On one corner is a pizza
parlor run by an Italian family who have refused to leave the neighborhood. One
of the young Black characters will have a job at the pizzeria.
Although the Black and Puerto Rican block residents seem to get along with
the Italian family, there is still an undercurrent of hostility. Of course this ten¬
sion explodes in the finale. There should be a full-scale riot—all hell should break
loose. Something provocative must set it off, like a cop shoots a kid and broth¬
ers go off. Then the rains come. I know, I know, sounds corny. But goddamn,
this is only the first page.
I’m making an allusion to the Howard Beach incident by using a pizza par¬
lor. The white kids in this case could be the sons of the owner of the pizzeria.
Danny Aiello would be good for the role of the owner. But depending on how
big the role is, I could ask Bob De Niro. He’d do it if he likes the script. One of
the sons could be Richard Edson from Stranger than Paradise.
The pizza parlor will have red, white, and green signs all over it like “Italian
Americans # i ”—the kind of banners you see at the Feast of San Gennaro in Lit¬
tle Italy.
Throughout the film we hear a DJ’s voice over the radio, broadcasting from
some fictional station. This device has been used to death, but we might be able
to rework it.
The station’s call name is WE LOVE RADIO. It broadcasts from a storefront
on the block. The DJ looks directly out onto the street and observes all the com¬
ings and goings. Passersby can watch him as he rocks the mike. This is gonna be
very stylized.
The DJ’s name is Mister Senor Love Daddy, the world’s only 7-24-3 6 j DJ.
That’s 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. He never goes to sleep.
“I work overtime for your love,” he says.
Playing on the final words of School Daze, “Please wake up,” the first words
of Do the Right Thing could be the DJ’s: “Hello Nueva York. It’s time to wake
up. It’s gonna be hot as a motherfucker.” Vicious. Maybe this is where we could
bring in Ossie Davis, our storyteller. Periodically he could come on camera and
narrate.
5 3 8 Directors
OSSIE: That’s right. Hot as a motherfucker. Of course y’can’t use that kind of
language on the radio, but if you could, that’s what Mister Senor Love
Daddy would say. It was so hot. . .
Then we cut to various things and characters he’s describing.
OSSIE: ... I mean hot. Hot as two dogs in heat. Okay, okay, y’get the picture.
I’m not sure about this running narration by a storyteller. Even if I don’t do it,
Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis are still gonna be down.
Something is happening. It’s not of my will, but something is happening. I’m
being singled out for m y acting as much as for my writing and directing. 11 started
with She’s Gotta Have It. I never expected such a response to Mars Blackmon.
I had a chance to forecast on my appeal as an actor at the five recruited
screenings we’ve had to date for School Daze. The minute I appear on screen,
the audience got excited. Every recruited audience gave my character, Half-Pint,
the highest rating. I’m not trying to say I did the strongest acting in the film, but
folks identified with me. I have something with people, and I think at this stage
it would be a mistake not to take this into consideration as I write Do the Right
Thing.
I do realize my limits as an actor. I could never carry an entire movie, nor
would I want to. But I know the things I can do. In this film I might want to play
a crazy, crazy kid, a psychopath, a madman. But he’s funny. The kind who would
kill somebody for stepping on his new sneakers—Air Jordans, no doubt.
I see a Black couple as being important characters in the film. The woman
will be pregnant. This will make for some good dialogue since pregnant women
are naturally cranky and the summertime is the worst time in the world to be
pregnant.
woman: I wish I wasn’t pregnant, goddamnit. This is the last one.
husband: Honey, relax you’re just irritable now.
woman: Irritable, my ass, I’m miserable. It’s hot as shit.
As usual I gotta have a vicious sex scene. For this one it’s gonna be a naked
female body with ice cubes. We should shoot it similar to the scenes in She’s Gotta
Have It, with extreme closeups. You’ll see these clear ice cubes melting fast on
a beautiful Black body. Smoke would be even better—smoke emitting from the
body. This female is literally on fire. The guy wants to love her, but she says it’s
too hot and sticky. “I don’t want to be bothered. It’s too hot for you to be hump¬
ing on me.” The guy, not to be outdone, goes to the refrigerator and pulls out
an ice tray. FREAKY DEAKY.
Spike Lee
539
Certain characters in this joint will have nicknames of jazz musicians and ath¬
letes.
Nicknames
ML
Jade
True Mathematics
Cannonball
E-Man
Moe
Count
Love Daddy
Deek
Duke
Kid
Mo-Freek
Sassy Sarah
Money
Sweto
Divine Dinah
Black
Cee
Tain
Lightskin
C
J-Master
Veets
Magic
Steep
Punchie
Enos
Puddin’ Head
Red
West Indian Willie
Lockjaw
Flatbush Phil
Coconut Sid
Ready Freddy
Black Jesus
Bleek
Dizzy
Ella
Brother
Mookie
Monk
Indestructible
Sally Boy
Theolopilus
Four Eyes
Sweet Feet
Ahmad
Milk Man
Bushwhack
Peace God
Sweet Dick Willie
Nighttrane
Bom Knowledge
Joe Radio
Too Tall
Gooders
Com Bread
Shorty
Fila
Jambone
Twinkie
Satchel
Macho
Smiley
Satchmo
Cool Papa Bell
Re-Re
Big Bethel
Josh
Clean Head
Knock Knock
Be So Mighty
I have to include a fire hydrant scene in the film. Someone opens a johnny
pump (in closeup). The water gushes out, then they put a can over the stream
of water, making the water spray clear across the street. Kids are thrown into
the water. Motorists drive by without closing their windows and their cars get
drenched.
A man drives down the street in a convertible. He pleads with the kids not
to wet him and they promise not to; one kid even stands in front of the hydrant.
The kid moves and the convertible is instantly soaked. The driver gets out and
chases after the kid, only to be hit by a blast of water from the hydrant. We hear
a siren. The cops show up and listen to the driver’s complaint. The driver wants
Directors
5 4 °
an arrest made. The people in the neighborhood stand around watching, but no
one points a finger to the kid who did it. The cops turn the hydrant off and
promise to bust some heads if they’re called again. When the kids grumble about
the heat, the cops tell them to watch out or they’ll be telling it to the judge.
We see the two cops in this scene throughout the film. They are corrupt,
probably crack dealers themselves.
The neighborhood will have a feel of the different cultures that make up the
city, specifically Black American, Puerto Rican, West Indian, Korean, and Ital¬
ian American. Unlike Woody Allen’s portraits of New York.
There ought to be an old lady who sits in her window, minding the block’s
business. She never leaves the window, or so it seems. And she doesn’t miss a
thing, either. Ruby Dee would be a great choice for this role.
Fellini’s Roma is a good model for this film. I remember seeing it years ago.
It’s a day in the life of Rome. In Do the Right Thing, it’s the hottest day of sum¬
mer in Brooklyn, New York.
Everybody is outside on hot summer nights. No one stays in their apartments.
Much of the action and dialogue should take place on the stoops. The stoops
should play a very important role in this film. Of course, it would be a crime if
we left out rooftops. Roofs are great locations.
We. should see kids running in the streets. Kids on dirt bikes, skateboards,
jumping double dutch, and playing pattycake. When I was a kid and the johnny
pump was open we would use ice cream sticks as boats and race them along the
gutter. There should be a feeling that the people on this block have lived as neigh¬
bors for a long time.
The block where the bulk of the film takes place should be a character in its
own right. I need to remember my early years for this. We gotta have a Mr.
Softee Ice Cream truck playing its theme song. When I was a kid, I ran after an
ice cream truck and was almost hit by a speeding car. A neighbor ran into the
street and snatched me from in front of the car in the nick of time. I ran home
as fast as I could, crying up a storm. That might be an episode, who knows?
The look of the film should be bright. The light in daytime should be an in¬
tense white light, almost blinding, and the colors, bright. I mean Puerto Rican
bright, afrocentric bright. Everybody will be wearing shorts and cutoff jeans.
Men will be shirtless, women in tube tops.
The image of this pizzeria keeps coming into my mind. It’s gonna be impor¬
tant in the end. It’s gonna be important. I see my character working there. He
hates it there, but he’s gotta have a job.
Sometime soon the characters will start talking to me very specifically. I will
hear their individual voices and put their words down on paper.
With the release of School Daze, there will be another slew of actors that I’ve
worked with before who will want roles in this new film. That ’ s fine, but I want
Spike Lee
541
to keep Do the Right Thing fresh with new faces. It’s always exciting to see a new
face give a good performance.
Not everyone who worked on School Daze is gonna be down on this one. Some
actors truly showed their ass. I have to watch that I don’t get too friendly with
the actors. Some take our friendship as a guarantee of a job for them.
The acting in School Daze is great. I will definitely use Bill Nunn, Kadeem
Hardison, Branford Marsalis, Eric Payne, Giancarlo Esposito, Larry Fishbume,
Leonard Thomas, Sam Jackson, and Tisha Campbell (provided her mother isn’t
her manager anymore). These people are a joy to work with.
Bill Nunn would be perfect as Mister Senor Love Daddy. At this stage, I
shouldn ’ t get caught up in who ’ s playing who. It will all come soon enough. Robi
Reed will be the casting director for this picture.
I would like to use some cast members from Sarafina! in this film. I’ll make
a point of inviting the entire cast to the premiere of School Daze.
Whenever I’m in L. A. I go to see Robin Harris at the Comedy Act Theatre.
He’s the MC there and he’s funny as shit. Don’t let Robin see somebody who
looks funny or is wearing some ill-fitting, ill-colored clothes, he goes off on them.
The guy has me in stitches. I have to suggest to Robi that we find a role for him.
He’s talented and deserves a shot.
I don’t know if I want to cast in L.A. this time. The best actors, for me, are
in Nueva York. There is a difference in attitude. Most L.A. actors are on a Hol¬
lywood trip. They’re into being stars and that’s it. The actors from New York
are more about work, which is the way it should be. Later for the star types.
Give me actors like Bill Nunn and Sam Jackson anytime.
I would like my main man, Monty Ross, vice-president of production at Forty
Acres, to play a small role in this film. He’s concentrating on producing now
but he’s still a good actor. At most it would be a day’s work. He can play some¬
one from the South. Who, I don’t know yet.
I definitely want Raye Dowell to have a substantial role in Do the Right Thing.
I still feel bad I had to cut her part in School Daze. But the entire scene had to go.
She’s a good actress and she gets better all the time.
I’ve agreed to write another short film for Saturday Night Live. It’s gonna be
a parody commercial featuring Slick Mahoney selling blue and green contact
lenses to Black people and introducing a new color, sapphire. It’ll take one day
to shoot. We can do it in the office in Brooklyn with a skeleton crew.
I’m trying to make the best film I can. I know there will be a million com¬
parisons made between this film and School Daze, but I can’t let that worry me.
Do the Right Thing isn’t as big in scope as School Daze. And hopefully it won’t have
as many characters. I do want it to be humorous. The story won’t be as linear
as School Daze. I would like to stop, tell a story within a story, and move on.
In this script I want to show the Black working class. Contrary to popular be-
£ 4 *
Directors
lief, we work. No welfare rolls here, pal, just hardworking people trying to make
a decent living. Earlier I wanted to get into the whole gentrification issue, but
I’m less enthusiastic about it now.
For the entire month of January I’m gonna put my ideas down on legal pads.
I think I’ll have enough material to start writing the actual script on or around
the first of February. Now mind you, February is also the month School Daze
opens. But I’ll try to be disciplined and not miss a day.
God willing, I’ll finish my first draft around the beginning of March. That
would give me five months before the first of August, when I want to start shoot¬
ing. I can shoot all my exterior scenes in August and save my interiors for cover
sets. That would be ideal. I would like the luxury of a ten-week shoot—at least.
I’m definitely not going back to Columbia Pictures with this project. It was
ideal under David Puttnam and David Picker, but with Dawn Steel (Steely
Dawn), forget about it. We both wentat itfrom the start. I don’t like her tastes,
don’t like her movies.
T wo of my first choices are Paramount Pictures and Touchstone. Jeffrey Kat-
zenberg at Touchstone is persistently pursuing my next film. I met with the big
cheeses at Paramount, Ned Tannen, Sid Ganis, and Gary Luchiesi, the last time
I was out in L.A. Paramount told me that they are interested. And since Para¬
mount Communications Inc. owns the Knicks, I might finally get the season tick¬
ets to games I need and deserve. Regardless, I’m looking for a place, a home,
where I can make the films I wantto make without outside or inside interference.
I must reserve the right to approve final cut of this film in my contract. School
Daze was such a learning experience for me. Monty, who coproduced the film,
and I weren’t aware of the many details—especially relating to contracts—that
must be seen to when you make a film on the scale of School Daze. That’s why
we hired an executive producer to hold our hands. Getting our executive pro¬
ducer to share this knowledge was like pulling teeth. Monty and I found out what
we needed to know in the end. But on the next project we will be better pre¬
pared for all matters relating to producing the film.
After Do the Right Thing, I might do The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The pro¬
ject is at Warner Brothers and Denzel Washington, who played Malcolm in an
off-Broadway play, is interested in the film role. We both agree that our in¬
volvement is contingent on absolute artistic control. If you think I’m gonna let
some white people determine the outcome of a project like the Malcolm X piece
with my name attached, you’re crazy. If that film is not done truthfully and right¬
eously, Black folks are gonna want to hang the guy behind it. Hell no. I’m not
having no Color Purple fiasco on my conscience.
Dialogue
We were so poor, we ate the hole out of a doughnut.
Spike Lee
£43
Idea
When we see people drinking beer, they’ll be sipping it through straws, ghetto
style.
December 27, 1987
I would like this script to be circular. Every character should have a function. If
a character is introduced, he or she should appear again and advance the script
in some way.
I may use an image that reappears throughout the film. In The Last Emperor it
was the cricket. Seeing the cricket at the end of the film made it magical for me.
After the climax of the film, I would like to have a coda. This scene could
take place the morning after the riot. We see the aftermath from the night be¬
fore. It’s not so hot on this day, and folks seem to have regained their senses.
I’ll have to think of a way to convey this.
It’s early, but I don’t want anyone to die in the riot. Some people will get
hurt. Some will definitely get fucked up, but as of now, no one will be killed.
While I was in the grocery today I heard a radio newscast that two Black youths
had been beaten up by a gang of white youths in Bensonhurst. The two Black
kids were hospitalized. They were collecting bottles and cans when they got
jumped. This happened on Christmas night. Just the other day some Black kids
fired up a white cab driver in Harlem. New York City is tense with racial ha¬
tred. Can you imagine if these incidents had taken place in the summer, on the
hottest day of the year? I’d be a fool not to work the subject of racism into Do
the Right Thing.
The way I see it, we’ll introduce the subject very lightly. People will expect
another humorous film from Spike Lee, but I’ll catch them off guard. Then I’ll
drop the bomb on them, they won’t be prepared for it.
If a riot is the climax of the film, what will cause the riot? Take your pick: an
unarmed Black child shot, the cops say he was reaching for a gun; a grandmother
shot to death by cops with a shotgun; a young woman, charged with nothing but
a parking violation, dies in police custody; a male chased by a white mob onto
a freeway is hit by a car.
It’s funny how the script is evolving into a film about race relations. This is
America’s biggest problem, always has been (since we got off the boat), always
will be. I’ve touched upon it in my earlier works, but I haven’t yet dealt with it
head on as a primary subject.
I need to use my juice to get the testimony of Cedric Sandiford and other key
witnesses in the Howard Beach case. We’re not only talking Howard Beach: It’s
Eleanor Bumpers, Michael Stewart, Yvonne Smallwood, etc.
544
Directors
If I go ahead in this vein, it might be in conflict with the way I want to tell
the story. It can’t be just a diatribe, white man this, white man that. The treat¬
ment of racism will have to be carried in the subtext until the end of the film.
Then again, being too avant-garde, too indirect, might trivialize the subject mat¬
ter. Any approach I take must be done carefully and realistically. I won’t be mak¬
ing any apologies. Truth and righteousness is on our side. Black folks are tired
of being killed.
This is a hot one. The studios might not want to touch this film. I know I’ll
come up against some static from the white press. They’ll say I’m trying to in¬
cite a race riot.
The entire story is starting to happen in my mind. “The hottest day of the
summer” is a good starting point, but I need more. I’ll be examining racial ten¬
sions and how the hot weather only makes them worse. These tensions mount,
then something happens outside or inside of the pizza parlor that triggers a
major incident.
Now I’m grounded. I know what I’m doing. It will be told from a Black point
of view. I’ve been blessed with the opportunity to express the views of Black
people who otherwise don’t have access to power and the media. I have to take
advantage of this while I’m still bankable.
The character I play in Do the Right Thing is from the Malcolm X school of
thought: “An eye for an eye.” Fuck the tum-the-other-cheek shit. If we keep up
that madness we’ll be dead. YO, it’s an eye for an eye.
It’s my character who sees a great injustice take place and starts the riot. He
turns a garbage can upside down, emptying the trash in the street. Then he goes
up to the pizza parlor screaming, “An eye for an eye, Howard Beach,” and hurls
the garbage can. It flies through the air in slow motion, shattering the pizza par¬
lor’s glass windows. All hell breaks loose. Everyone takes part in the riot, even
the old woman who sits in her window watching the block. This is random vi¬
olence. But before this, the cops do something that escalates the conflict to vi¬
olence . They might even kill someone. The riot takes off, and it’s the Italians in
the pizza parlor who have to pay.
In the riot scene, it might be vicious if no words were spoken until my char¬
acter throws the garbage can in the window and screams “Howard Beach.”
The subject matter is so volatile, it must be on the QT. No way are people
gonna read the script, especially agents. I’m not giving out information on the
film until it’s about to be released. Mum’s da word.
My sister Joie will be the female lead in this film. With each film she’s got¬
ten bigger and better roles. Joie has been studying acting with Alice Spivak, who
taught me while I was at NYU. Joie has a natural thing with a camera. Either
you have it or you don’t, and Joie does. Now it’s up to me to write the right
role for her. She’ll definitely be a star in this one. Joie will play my character’s
Spike Lee
sister. We live together in an apartment on the block. For the most part, I’m
shiftless and lazy and have no ambition. My sister always pushes me to do bet¬
ter, to expect more from myself. She works and goes to school at night.
One of the sons of the pizza parlor owner has an eye for her. I know this and
I tell him “no haps.” After the pizza parlor is burnt to the ground in the riot,
Sal’s sons want the big payback. They happen to run into my sister on her way
from night school. What they do to her, I don’t know yet.
Dialogue
Those who tell don’t know.
Those who know won’t tell.
December 28, 1987
Of course we must have one of those Uncle Tom Handkerchief Niggers on the
block. He’s one of those people who love the white man more than he loves
himself. He tries to stop the riot. He’s in front of the pizzeria urging folks not
to tear it down. The folks pull him to the side and give him a few good licks up¬
side the head.
There might be a fruit and vegetable stand on the block, owned by a Korean
family. During the riot scene, the entire family is outside the store pleading me
black, me black, me NO white, me black too. The folks are more amused than
anything else. They leave the store untouched.
The Italian family that owns and runs the pizzeria does not live in the neigh¬
borhood. They might live in Canarsie or Bensonhurst.
There’s static between my character and the sons of the pizzeria owner. We
go at it all the time, exchanging insults. “You junglebunny—nigger mother¬
fucker!” “You dago—wop—spaghetti bender—fake Don Corleone asshole!”
Their father has to break it up and threatens to fire all of us.
When the sons are alone with the father, they want to know why he hired
me. They ask him if he’s a nigger lover. The father tells them that having my
character around makes for good business. “This is a Black neighborhood, we’re
a minority. Look, I’ve never had no trouble with Blacks, don’t want none ei¬
ther. So don’tyou start. Isn’t it hot enough already without you starting up? Lis¬
ten to your old man. Relax or I’m gonna kick your I’m-a-man-know-it-all ass.
Now all of youse, go and work. Let your old man take a breather.”
When the pizzeria is being burnt to the ground, the owner asks one of the
old people, maybe Ruby Dee’s character, why his store was hit. The woman
546 Directors
answers: “You were there. The first white folks they saw. You was there. That’s
all.”
Somewhere in the script there should be a dialogue about how the Black man
in America owns very little. The character points to the Korean fruit and veg¬
etable stand across the street:
MAN # i: Look at those Korean motherfuckers across the street. I betcha they
hadn’t been a month off the boat before they opened up their place. A
motherfucking month off the boat and they’re in business in our neigh¬
borhood, occupying a storefront that had been boarded up for longer than
I care to remember, and I’ve been here a long time. Now for the life of
me, I haven’t been able to figger this out. Either dem Koreans are geniuses
or we Blacks are dumb.
MAN #2: But wait a minute, it’s not just the Koreans. Don’t pick on them.
Everyone else has a business and supports their own but us. I’ll be one
happy fellow to see us have our own businesses. I’d be the first one in line
to spend my hard-earned money. Yep, that’s right. I’d be the first in line.
Somebody in his audience says: “Aw shut up nigger and sit down.”
I can’t have too many of these speeches. This is cinema, not the stage.
My goal as a filmmaker is to get better with each outing. I have to pinpoint
the areas I need to work on. What are my weaknesses? The first thing that comes
to mind is better communication with actors. I need to give them a clearer idea
of my vision, my understanding of the script, and of the characters. I might have
a picture in my head, but I have to take it further than that. I would also like to
enhance my visual sense. In the past I’ve leaned too heavily on my cinematog¬
rapher Ernest Dickerson, who I’ve worked with since film school. But I’m
gonna assert myself more in that area.
I want the camera moving all the time, more than it did in School Daze. I see
a shot where the camera tracks down a row of stoops filled with people. On each
stoop there’s a different conversation happening. The camera moves slowly from
stoop to stoop. Vicious. Also, I want to use long choreographed shots for most
of this film. I do not want a lot of cutting.
It might be possible to use a sky-cam given that we’ll be shooting on one block.
Since a sky-cam camera is controlled by remote, it could float effortlessly from
rooftops down to the sidewalk and vice versa.
We definitely have to use a sky-cam on the shot where I scream “Howard
Beach” and throw the garbage can. The sky cam has to descend from the heav¬
ens into a closeup of me screaming “Howard Beach.” Vicious.
It’s of utmost importance that this film be shot in summer. The earliest we
could do it is August. We’re talking the dog days of summer. There would be
Simon G 1 e a v e and Jason Forest
J47
no need to fake the heat. This means I’ve got work ahead of me. But if it’s film
work, that’s okay.
I want to have fun writing this script. I never want it to be a chore or a bur¬
den. It doesn’t have to be. Any day shit isn’t flowing, I’ll just stop and continue
the next day. Whenever I force myself to write, I don’t produce anything worth¬
while anyway.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if I brought a character or two back from She’s Gotta
Have It or School Dazel I think I’m gonna do it. Reprising Mars Blackmon would
be a big mistake. Should Tracy Camilia Johns come back as Nola Darling? Nah,
bad idea. Maybe shouldn’t bring anyone back.
Simon Gleave and
Jason Forest
Quentin Tarantino’sfirst two features had an impact in film circles not unlike the early
performances ofRobert Altman, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. Tarantino himself quickly
became a high-profile celebrity by appearing on talk shows and in an endless stream of
cameos in hisfriends’films. He was talented, he was articulate, he was exhibitionist, and
hisfilms attacked the tiredformulas of conventional screenplays. Generation X embraced
him like a savior. By coincidence, his Pulp Fiction (1994) became a hit at about the
same time the Internet and World Wide Web were exploding, and Tarantino became the
Net’s favorite director. At one point there was even a "Church of Tarantino,’’ not to men¬
tion countless discussion groups and Web pages. Here is a “FAQ_File’’from a Tarantino
net site in Great Britain; the initials stand for "Frequently Asked Questions’’that the pro¬
prietors are tired of handling one at a time. It’s the detail here that’s astonishing: QT's
fans seem to have gone over his films with a fine-toothed cinematic comb. All original punc¬
tuation, spelling, and language have been preserved.
£ 4-8 Directors
“Frequently Asked Questions about
Quentin Tarentino”
Pulp Fiction
The film opens in a diner as a couple of thieves discuss the possibility of hold¬
ing up restaurants. This leads us into three distinct strands; a date between a hit
man and the wife of his boss, the boxer who is supposed to throw a fight and
the cleaning up of a hit man’s mistake. The stories are told in non chronologi¬
cal order and we finally return to the diner for the final scene.
1. What is contained in the briefcase?
There is no real answer to this and Tarantino has actually said that he didn’t
know what to putin the case so he decided to leave it to the viewers to decide.
However, it has been suggested that it contains ‘the evil that men do’ and as the
combination of the briefcase is 666, I’m prepared to go with this. Another great
suggestion is that it contains the diamonds from ‘Reservoir Dogs’.
2. What films have irfluenced Tarantino in the making of 'Pulp Fiction’?
The dance competition is clearly influenced by Jean Luc Godard’s 1964 film
‘Bande A Parte’ which Tarantino has named his production company after.
The unknown contents of the briefcase are a homage to Robert Aldrich’s film
‘Kiss Me Deadly’, made in 19^5.
When Butch stops at the lights and sees Marsellus crossing the road, we are
reminded of Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘Psycho’ when Janet Leigh stops at a set of
lights to see her boss crossing the road.
The pawn shop rape is clearly reminiscent of ‘Deliverance’, made in 1972
by John Boorman.
‘The Bonnie Situation’ contains Jules and his friend Jimmy, clearly a refer¬
ence to Francois Truffaut’s film, ‘Jules et Jim’.
The character of Wolf i n this story i s taken from Jean Reno ’s portrayal o f a
‘cleaner’ in Luc Besson’s ‘La Femme Nikita’, a role reprised by Keitel himself
in the American remake ‘Point of No Return’.
I n addition, the films of John Woo, Sam Peckinpah, Brian D e Palma and Don
Siegel are all important.
3. Why did Mia overdose at her house?
She thought that she was snorting cocaine whereas she was taking Vince’s ex-
Simon G1 e a ve and Jason Forest
849
tremely pure heroin. His heroin had been packaged as cocaine would normally
be because his dealer had run out of the standard heroin packaging.
4. Why did Butch return to the pawn shop to save Marsellus?
Redemption is one of the central themes of this film and this scene along with
Jules’ saving of Honey Bunny and Pumpkin in the diner are the best examples
of this. Butch’s conscience made him go back to save Marsellus and this acted
as his redemption for killing Wilson in the previous night’s boxing match.
g. Why did Vince leave his gun on the counter at Butch’s apartment when he went
to the bathroom?
Quite simply, he didn’t, the gun belonged to Marsellus. Vince was clearly
with somebody else at the apartment as he didn’t react when Butch came in,
thinking it was his partner. Jules had given up ‘the life’ by this point and Marsel¬
lus was probably filling in on this job. For further evidence look at the scene
where Butch runs Marsellus over; the ‘big man’ is carrying two cups and as he
is near to Butch’s apartment, we can assume that he is Vince’s partner.
6. Why are Honey Bunny’s lines different from the beginning of the film and at the
end?
A lot of people seem to think this is a mistake. My opinion is that Tarantino
was showing us the difference between perceptions of different people in the
diner, the second time being Jules’ perception. It makes little sense for Taran¬
tino to shoot the scene twice, unless there was a reason.
7. What was Winston Wolf doing in a tuxedo at 8:30 in the morning? Where was
he?
The script explains that Winston was in a hotel suite where people were gam¬
bling. If you listen closely, you can hear someone in the room telling the gam¬
blers to ‘place their bets’.
8. What was the book that Vince was reading on the toilet?
“Modesty Blaise”, a pulpy novel written by Peter O’Donnell in 1965 which
is very much in keeping with the film’s title.
9. How does a guy like Jimmy know a gangster like Jules? Why does Jules refer to him
as ‘his partner’?
Quentin has said in an interview (Denver Post) that Jimmy used to work for
Marsellus, but when he married Bonnie she made him quit, and Jules respects
that.
JJO Directors
i o. Who was Marvin and why did Jules and Vince take him with them?
I think we can assume that Marvin also works for Marsellus as Vince refers
to ‘our guy’ before they go up to the apartment.
11. Why is there a band-aid on Marsellus’ neck?
The actor Ving Rhames simply had a rather ugly looking scar on the back of
his neck and so the make-up artist covered this up with a band-aid so that the
scar didn’t distract the audience too much.
i 2. There’s bullet holes in the wall behind Jules and Vince before ‘The Fourth Man’
(a.k.a. Seinfeld) empties his gun. Was this an editing error?
It seems to be possible that the holes might have been there for other rea¬
sons, it’s not a great apartment, but it could be a mistake in editing.
13. Red Apple cigarettes appear throughout the film, what are they?
Tarantino seems to have invented this brand presumably to minimise the
amount of product placement in the film. This is also done by using other brands
which were around in the 1970’s but are no longer available (ie Fruite Brute ce¬
real).
14. What happened to the Gimp? Did Butch kill him, or was he just knocked out?
The script explains that Butch hitting the Gimp caused him to hang himself
to death on his leash.
1 £. Trivia
a) During the opening scene, you can see the bottom half of Vince as he makes
his way to the bathroom. Look out for his book, shorts, t-shirt and ‘strut’.
b) The Buddy Holly waiter in Jack Rabbit Slims is played by Steve Buscemi
who as Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs, refused to tip waitresses.
c) The room in Lance’s apartment where Mia receives the injection of adren¬
alin contains two board games, Operation and Life.
d) The cabdriver, Esmeralda Villa Lobos (Angela Jones) appeared in a 30
minute short called ‘Curdled’ in which she played a character who cleaned up
after murders. This makes her fascinated by the idea of murder. Tarantino saw
this film and decided to include this character in Pulp Fiction but as a cabdriver.
e) When Butch is sneaking up to his apartment, there is an advert for Jack
Rabbit Slims on the radio.
f) Butch’s great-grandfather bought the gold watch in Knoxville, Tennessee
and this is also where Butch is meeting his connection. Knoxville is Quentin
Tarantino’s birthplace.
g) The undercard for Butch’s fight is Vossler vs Martinez; Russell Vossler and
Simon Gleave and Jason Forest
SS 1
Jerry Martinez are two friends of Tarantino’s from Video Archives who use to
live together and their constant fighting was the butt of jokes around the store.
h) Lawrence Bender plays the ‘long haired yuppy scum’ in the restaurant hold
U P-
i) The guy who comes out of the bathroom is played by Alexis Arquette who
is the brother of Rosanna and Patricia.
j) The cartoon being watched by the young Butch was ‘Clutch Cargo’, a kid’s
show from the sixties. The film playing in the motel room was ‘The Losers’ di¬
rected by Jack Starrett in 197 o; it’s about five Hell’s Angels sent to Cambodia
by the CIA to rescue a presidential adviser who has been captured by commu¬
nists.
Soundtrack and Location in the Film:
Misirlou — Dick Dale Opening credits.
Jungle Boogie — Kool and the Gang Opening credits.
Let’s Stay Together — Al Green While Jules and Vincent are at Marsellus’
club.
Bustin’ Surfboards — The Tornadoes Playing when Rosanna Arquette is talk¬
ing about her body piercing.
Lonesome Town — Ricky Nelson Sung by the Ricky Nelson impersonator at
Jack Rabbit Slims.
Son of a Preacherman — Dusty Springfield While Vincent is waiting for Mia
at her house.
Bullwinkle Pt. II — Centurians As Vincent is driving to Mia’s house after leav¬
ing Lance’s place.
You Never Can Tell — Chuck Berry The Twist Contest at Jack Rabbit Slims.
Girl, Y ou’ll Be A Woman Soon — Urge Overkill Mia dancing by herself while
Vince is in the bathroom at her house.
If Love Is a Red Dress — Maria McKee Maynard’s store when Butch and
Marsellus first come in fighting. Comanche — The Revels Butch and Zed “bond¬
ing” in the pawn shop.
Flowers on the Wall — Statler Brothers Playing when Butch is leaving his apart¬
ment having killed Vincent.
Surf Rider — The Lively Ones End credits.
Tarantino Miscellany
Jules’ speech from Ezekiel 25:17:
‘The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides with the iniquities of the
selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and
Directors
SS2
good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his
brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon
those with great vengeance and with furious anger those who attempt to poison
and destroy my brothers. And you will know that my name is the Lord when I
lay my vengeance upon thee.’
This is actually not directly from Ezekiel 25:17 and in fact, only the last sen¬
tence and part of the second last sentence will be found there.
The racism question
I’ve decided not to tackle this subject because whatever I write is not going to
change anybody’s viewpoint. However, Tarantino has said, “. . . that’s the way
my characters talk in the movies I’ve made so far. I also feel that the word ‘nig¬
ger’ is one of the most volatile words in the English language and anytime any¬
one gives a word that much power, I think everybody should be shouting it from
the rooftops to take the power away. I grew up around blacks and have no fear
of it, I grew up saying it as an expression.” Movieline, Aug 1994
The ‘Tarantinoverse’
There has been a lot of discussion about the fact that the same character names
appear in different Tarantino scripts and whether these people are either related
or one in the same. The common names so far are as follows:
Alabama — White has worked with someone of this name in RD [Reservoir Dogs]
and she is one of the main protagonists in TR [True Romance],
Spivey — Marsellus is mentioned in RD and Drexl appears in TR.
Marsellus — as above and ‘the big man’ in PF [Pulp Fiction],
Vega — Vic (Mr. Blonde) in RD and Vincent in PF.
Marvin — the cop in RD and the inside man in PF.
Scagnetti — Seymour in RD and Jack in NBK [Natural Bom Killers],
Nash — Marvin the cop in RD, and Gerald the cop in NBK.
The best explanation is that the names reflect Tarantino’s ideas so the name
Vega is used for a killer, the name Marvin is a fall guy and Scagnetti is an au¬
thority figure. I don’t hold with the view that Vincent and Blonde are brothers
and this seems to be a much more satisfactory explanation.
Wbitebs
Ben Hecht
In 192s the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz cabled his old newspaper pal Ben Hecht:
“Willyou accept three hundred per week to workjor Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid.
The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only compe¬
tition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.’’ Hecht (l 893—1964) answered the call and
stayed to become one of the most prolific screenwriters in Hollywood history, often in col¬
laboration with his friends Gene Fowler and Charles MacArthur. Hecht was a legendary
drinker, bon vivant, and storyteller, whose autobiography, A Child of the Century, doc¬
uments the raffish side of Hollywood in the 1930s. Here he tells about rewriting Gone
with the Wind, explaining to Al Capone’s lieutenants why Scarf ace was not about Scar-
face, and witnessing the last days of the has-been silent star Jack Gilbert.
from A Child of the Century
Apuleius’ Golden Stooge
I have taken part in at least a thousand story conferences. I was present always
as the writer. Others present were the “producer,” the director and sometimes
the head of the studio and a small tense group of his admirers.
The producer’s place in movie making is a matter that, in Hollywood, has
not yet been cleared up. I shall try to bring some clarity to it.
The big factory where movies are made is run by a superproducer called Head
of the Studio who sits in the Front Office and is as difficult of access as the Grand
Lama. He is the boss, appointed by the studio Owner himself. Thus, despite the
veneration in which he is held by the thousand studio underlings, he is actually
the greatest of the movieland stooges. He must bend his entire spirit to the phi¬
losophy of the movie Owner—“make money.” He must translate this greedy
cry of the Owner into a program for his studio. He must examine every idea,
888
jj6 Writers
plot or venture submitted to him from the single point of view of whether it is
trite enough to appeal to the masses.
If he fails in this task, he is summoned from his always teetering studio throne
to the movie Owner’s New York Office, in which nothing ever teeters. Here
he receives a drubbing which the lowest of his slaves would not tolerate. He is
shown pages of box-office returns. He is shoved into the presence of homicidal
theater Owners snarling of empty seats. Proof is hurled at his head that he has
betrayed his great trust, that he is ruining the movie industry, and that he is ei¬
ther an idiot or a scoundrel.
Shaken and traumatized, he returns to his throne in the studio. Here he must
wiggle himself into the Purple again and be ready to flash his eyes and terrorize
his underlings with his Olympian whims.
His immediate underlings are the producers. He has hired them to do the ac¬
tual movie making for him. After all, no one man can weigh, discuss and ma¬
nipulate fifty movie plots at one time. He has to have lieutenants, men who will
keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be car¬
ried away by art in any of its subversive guises.
Illustrations by Dor£ (Gustave)
There are different kinds of producers in the studios, ranging from out-and-out
illiterates to philosophers and aesthetes. But all of them have the same function.
Their task i s to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists o f cliche.
Writers and directors can be carried away by a “strange” characterization or a
new point of view; a producer, never. The producer is the shadow cast by the
studio’s Owner. It falls across the entire studio product.
I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than
the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may
be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.
The job of turning good writers into movie hacks is the producer’s chief task.
These sinister fellows were always my bosses. Though I was paid often five and
ten times more money than they for my working time, they were my judges. It
was their minds I had to please.
I can recall a few bright ones among them, and fifty nitwits. The pain of hav¬
ing to collaborate with such dullards and to submit myself to their approvals was
always acute. Years of experience failed to help. I never became reconciled to
taking literary orders from them. I often prepared myself for a producer con¬
ference by swallowing two sleeping pills in advance.
I have always considered that half of the large sum paid me for writing a movie
script was in payment for listening to the producer and obeying him. I am not
Ben Hech t
SS7
being facetious. The movies pay as much for obedience as for creative work. An
able writer is paid a larger sum than a man of small talent. But he is paid this
added money not to use his superior talents.
I often won my battle with producers. I was able to convince them that their
suggestions were too stale or too infantile. But I won such battles only as long
as I remained on the grounds. The minute I left the studio my victory vanished.
Every sour syllable of producer invention went back into the script and every
limping foot of it appeared on the screen.
Months later, watching “my” movie in a theater, I realized that not much
damage actually had been done. A movie is basically so trite and glib that the
addition of a half dozen miserable inanities does not cripple it. It blares along
barking out its inevitable cliches, and only its writer can know that it is a shade
worse than it had to be.
Diavolo, Again —
Such is half of my story of Hollywood. The other half is the fun I had—during
the heyday of the movies— 19 2 5 to 1945. There was never a more marzipan
kingdom than this land of celluloid.
There was only one factory rule. Make a movie that went over big at the pre¬
view, and the town was yours. You could be as daft as you wanted, as drunk
and irreverent as Panurge, and, still, the bosses bowed as ^ou passed. The bosses
were all earthy fellows with the smell of junk yards, tire exchanges, and other
murky business pasts clinging to their sport ensembles. Though we wore their
yoke, we were nevertheless literary royalty, men of grammar.
In the time when I first arrived in it, the movie world was still young. Jhinns
and ogres, odalisques, Sindbads and earth shakers were still around in whole¬
sale lots, especially the ogres. And whatever the weather elsewhere in the world,
it rained only gold in Hollywood.
Mankiewicz’s telegram had told the truth. Hollywood, 1925, was another
boom town, and my nerves were alive to its hawker’s cry an hour after I had
left the train. It reminded me happily of that other Eldorado—Miami. Miami
had run up the price of its real estate. Hollywood was doing the same thing for
talent, any kind of talent from geese trainers to writers and actors.
Hungry actors leaped from hall bedrooms to terraced mansions. Writers and
newspapermen who had hoboed their way West began hiring butlers and lay¬
ing down wine cellars. Talent, talent, who had talent for anything—for beat¬
ing a drum, diving off a roof, writing a joke, walking on his hands? Who could
think up a story, any kind of story? Who knew how to write it down? And who
had Ego? That was the leading hot cake—Ego or a pair of jiggling boobies under
Writers
morning-glory eyes. Prosperity chased them all. New stars were being hatched
daily, and new world-famous directors and producers were popping daily out
of shoe boxes.
I went to work for Paramount Pictures, Inc., over which the Messrs. Zukor,
Lasky and Schulberg presided. They occupied the three Vatican suites on the
main floor of a long, plaster building that looked like a Bavarian bathhouse. It
still stands, empty of almost everything but ghosts.
Most of the important people got drunk after one o’clock, sobered up around
three-thirty and got drunk again at nine. Fist fights began around eleven. Se¬
duction had no stated hours. The skimpy offices shook with passion. The min¬
gled sound of plotting and sexual moans came through the transoms. It was a
town of braggadocio and youth. Leading ladies still suffered from baby fat (rather
than budding wattles as today) and the film heroes had trouble growing mus¬
taches.
Nor was the industry yet captive. There were as many wildcatters around as
bankers. And the movies, God bless ’em, were silent. The talkies had not yet
come to make headaches for the half-illiterate viziers of the Front Office. In fact,
to the best of my recollection, there were no headaches. There were no unions,
no censor boards, no empty theater seats. It was Round Three and everybody
looked like a champion.
Movies were seldom written. They were yelled into existence in conferences
that kept going in saloons, brothels and all-night poker games. Movie sets roared
with arguments and organ music. Sometimes little string orchestras played to
help stir up the emotions of the great performers— “Traumerei” for Clara Bow
and the “Meditation” from Thais for Adolphe Menjou, the screen’s most so¬
phisticated lover.
I was given an office at Paramount. A bit of cardboard with my name inked
on it was tacked on the door. A soiree started at once in my office and lasted for
several days. Men of letters, bearing gin bottles, arrived. Bob Benchley, hallooing
with laughter as if he had come on the land of Punch and Judy, was there; and
the owlish-eyed satirist Donald Ogden Stewart, beaming as at a convention of
March Hares. One night at a flossy party Don appeared on the dance floor in a
long overcoat. “That’s silly and showing off to dance in an overcoat,” said the
great lady of the films in his arms. “Please take it off.” Don did. He had nothing
on underneath. F. Scott Fitzgerald was there, already pensive and inquiring if
there were any sense to life, and muttering, at thirty, about the cruelty of grow¬
ing aged.
Listening to Mankiewicz, Edwin Justice Mayer, Scott Fitzgerald, Ted Shayne
and other litterateurs roosting in my office, I learned that the Studio Bosses (circa
1925) still held writers in great contempt and considered them a waste of
money. I learned, also, that Manky had gotten me my job by a desperate coup.
Ben Hecht
SS 9
The studio chieftain, the mighty B. P. Schulberg, smarting from experience with
literary imports, had vowed never to hitch another onto the pay roll. Manky had
invaded the Front Office, his own two-year contract in his hand. He had an¬
nounced that if his friend Hecht failed to write a successful movie they could
tear up his contract and fire us both.
I was pleased to hear this tale of loyalty and assured Manky The New York Times
would be happy to take him back on its staff if things went awry.
On my fourth day, I was summoned and given an assignment. Producer
Bernard Fineman, under Schulberg, presented me with the first “idea” for a
movie to smite my ears.
An important industrialist, said he, was shaving one morning. His razor
slipped and he cut his chin. He thereupon sent out his butler to buy an alum stick
to stop the flow of blood. The butler was slowed up by a traffic jam and the great
industrialist, fuming in his onyx bathroom, had to wait fifteen minutes for the
alum stick. The movie I was to make up was to show all the things that were af¬
fected in the world by this fifteen-minute delay. I recall of the details only that
something went wrong with the pearl fisheries. The whole thing ended up with
the great industrialist’s mistress deserting him, his vast enterprises crashing, and
his wife returning to his side to help him build a new life.
I relate this plot because my distaste for it started me as a successful scenario
writer. 1 had seen no more than a dozen movies but I had heard in my four days
in Hollywood all that was to be known about the flickers.
“I want to point out to you,” said Manky, “that in a novel a hero can lay ten
girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as
well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have
as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the ser¬
vants. But you have to shoot him in the end. When he falls with a bullet in his
forehead, it is advisable that he clutch at the Gobelin tapestry on the library wall
and bring it down over his head like a symbolic shroud. Also, covered by such
a tapestry, the actor does not have to hold his breath while he is being pho¬
tographed as a dead man.”
An idea came to me. The thing to do was to skip the heroes and heroines, to
write a movie containing only villains and bawds. I would not have to tell any
lies then.
Thus, instead of a movie about an industrialist cutting his chin, I made up a
movie about a Chicago gunman and his moll called Feathers McCoy. As a news¬
paperman I had learned that nice people—the audience—loved criminals, doted
on reading about their love problems as well as their sadism. My movie,
grounded on this simple truth, was produced with the title of Underworld. It was
the first gangster movie to bedazzle the movie fans and there were no lies in it—
except for a half-dozen sentimental touches introduced by its director, Joe von
j6o
Wr iters
Sternberg. I still shudder remembering one of them. My head villain, Bull
Weed, after robbing a bank, emerged with a suitcase full of money and paused
in the crowded street to notice a blind beggar and give him a coin—before mak¬
ing his getaway.
It was not von Sternberg who helped me put the script together but another
director, Arthur Rossen. Art Rossen was the first of these bonny directorial gen¬
tlemen with whom I was for many years to spend happy days locked away in
fancy hotel rooms sawing away at plots. Art was one of the best of them, but,
with a few nightmarish exceptions, they were all good. They were the new sort
of storyteller produced by the movies, and, to this day, they remain the only
authentic talent that has come out of Hollywood.
The Paramount Viziers, all four of them including the ex-prize fighter Mr.
Zukor, listened to my reading of Underworld. It was eighteen pages long and it
was full of moody Sandburgian sentences. The viziers were greatly stirred. I was
given a ten-thousand-dollar check as a bonus for the week’s work, a check which
my sponsor Mankiewicz snatched out of my hand as I was bowing my thanks.
“You’ll have it back in a week,” Manky said. “I just want it for a few days to
get me out of a little hole.”
My return to New York was held up for several weeks while Manky strug¬
gled to raise another ten thousand to pay me back. He gambled valiantly, toss¬
ing a coin in the air with Eddie Cantor and calling heads or tails for a thousand
dollars. He lost constantly. He tried to get himself secretly insured behind his
good wife Sarah’s back, planning to hock the policy and thus meet his obliga¬
tion. This plan collapsed when the insurance company doctor refused to accept
him as a risk.
I finally solved the situation by taking Manky into the Front Office and in¬
forming the studio bosses of our joint dilemma. I asked that my talented friend
be given a five-hundred-dollar-a-week raise. The studio could then deduct this
raise from his salary and give it to me. Thus in twenty weeks I would be repaid.
I left the Vatican suite with another full bonus check in my hand; and Manky,
with his new raise, became the highest paid writer for Paramount Pictures, Inc.
The Clowns: Pink Period
Making movies is a game played by a few thousand toy-minded folk. It is ob¬
sessive, exhausting and jolly, as a good game should be. Played intently, it di¬
vorces you from life, as a good game will do. For many years I was one of the
intent, though part-time, players. I paid some twenty visits to Hollywood and
remained there each time only long enough to earn enough money to live on
for the rest of the year. This required from two weeks to three or four months
Ben H echt
£6 i
of work. With my bank balance restored, I would seize my hat and fly. Near¬
ing penury again, I would turn again to Hollywood. There went with me, usu¬
ally, Rose, a relative or two, two or three servants, many trunks and suitcases,
all my oil paintings and whatever animals we possessed.
I remember, along with my indignation, the sunny streets of Hollywood, full
of amiable and antic destinations. I remember studios humming with intrigue
and happy-go-lucky excitements. I remember fine homes with handsome but¬
lers and masterpieces on the walls; vivid people, long and noisy luncheons, nights
of gaiety and gambling, hotel suites and rented palaces overrun with friends, part¬
ners, secretaries and happy servants. I remember thousands of important phone
calls, yelling matches in the lairs of the caliphs, baseball, badminton and card
games; beach and ocean on diamond-sparkling days, rainstorms out of Joseph
Conrad and a picnic of money-making. More than all these pleasant things, I re¬
member the camaraderie of collaboration.
Although I wrote most of my sixty movies alone, all my movie writing was
a collaboration of one sort or another. The most satisfactory of these were my
actual literary collaborations with MacArthur, Lederer or Fowler. The Holly¬
wood party grew happier at such times.
But even without collaborators, the loneliness of literary creation was sel¬
dom part of mo vie work. Y ou wrote with the phone ringing like a firehouse bell,
with the boss charging in and out of your atelier, with the director grimacing
and grunting in an adjoining armchair. Conferences interrupted you, agents with
dream jobs flirted with you, and friends with unsolved plots came in hourly. Dis¬
asters circled your pencil. The star for whom you were writing fell ill or refused
to play in the movie for reasons that stood your hair on end. (“I won’t do this
movie,” said Ingrid Bergman of Spellbound, “because I don’t believe the love story.
The heroine is an intellectual woman, and an intellectual woman simply can’t
fall in love so deeply.” She played the part very convincingly.) The studio for
which you were working suddenly changed hands and was being reorganized.
This meant usually no more than the firing of ten or twenty stenographers, but
the excitement was unnerving. Or the studio head decided it would be better
to change the locale of your movie from Brooklyn to Peking. You listened to
these alarms, debated them like a juggler spinning hoops on his ankles, and kept
on writing.
Of the bosses with whom I collaborated, Selznick and Zanuck and Goldwyn
were the brightest. David, in the days he loved movie making, was a brilliant
plotter. He could think of twenty different permutations of any given scene with¬
out stopping to catch his breath. Darryl was also quick and sharp and plotted at
the top of his voice, like a man hollering for help. Goldwyn as a collaborator
was inarticulate but stimulating. He filled the room with wonderful panic and
beat at your mind like a man in front of a slot machine, shaking it for a jackpot.
j 62
Writers
Of the directors with whom I collaborated, most were sane and able fellows.
I remember them happily—the young, piano-playing Leo McCarey, with a
comedy fuse sputtering in his soul; the ex—clog dancer Ernst Lubitsch, who loved
rhythm and precision in his scripts; the drawling fashion plate Howard Hawks,
a-purr with melodrama; the moody and elegant Harry D’ Arrast; the gentlemanly
Alfred Hitchcock, who gave off plot turns like a Roman candle; the witty and
Boccaccian Otto Preminger; the antic Jack Conway; the hysterical Gregory
Ratoff; the chuckling, wild-hearted Willie Wellman; the soft-spoken, world¬
hopping Henry Hathaway; the aloof and poetical Victor Fleming. These and
many others were all men of talent with salty personalities. Working with them
was like playing a game—“Gimmick, Gimmick, Who’s Got the Gimmick?”
There were directors, however, who added some depressing rules to the game
and made collaboration a messy affair. These were the humorless ones to whose
heads fame had gone like sewer gas. They resented a scenario writer as if he were
an enemy hired by the Front Office to rob them of their greatness. They scowled
at dialogue, shuddered at jokes, and wrestled with a script until they had shaken
out of it all its verbal glitter and bright plotting. Thus they were able to bring
to the screen evidence only oftheir own “genius.” This consisted of making great
psychological or dramatic points by using props, scenic effects or eye-rolling
close-ups instead of speech. Knowing these pretenders well and the foolish ego¬
mania that animated their work, I managed to avoid most of them. A few, how¬
ever, fell like rain into my life and darkened some of my days.
This sickly “greatness” is, however, rare in Hollywood. I remember little of
it. At dinner parties where all the guests were famous movie stars and direc¬
tors, none acted famous or even felt famous. Their world-known faces were full
of shyness or sociability. The enormous publicity that flared around stars and
directors seldom touched their inner personalities, which were as modest and
eager as those of factory workers on a picnic. The only strut I remember was
the strut of power. A few of the studio caliphs were inclined to make lordly en¬
trances and to relish a bit of homage.
My favorite collaborator in Hollywood was neither writer, director nor boss,
but the cameraman Lee Garmes. It was with Lee as a partner that I made all my
own pictures, starting with Crime without Passion and The Scoundrel, Specter of the
Rose and Actors and Sin. Lee introduced me to the real magic of the movie
world—its technical talents. He was not only one of the finest camera artists in
Hollywood but more learned about movie making than anyone I met in
movieland. The camera was a brush with which he painted, but in his painting
was the knowledge of the hundred hazards of a movie set. Nothing I ever en¬
countered in the movies was as uniquely talented as the eyes of Lee Garmes. I
prided myself on being an acute observer, but beside Lee I was almost a blind
man. Driving his car at fifty miles an hour he would inquire if I had noticed the
Ben H echt
J63
girl in the back seat of a car that had passed us, speeding in the opposite direc¬
tion. What about her, I would ask. Lee would beam, “We ought to put that in
a picture sometime. She was using daisies for cufflinks, real daisies.”
Standing on a set, Lee saw a hundred more things than I did. He saw shad¬
ows around mouths and eyes invisible to me, high lights on desk tops, ink stands
and trouser legs. He spotted wrong reflections and mysterious obstructions—
shoulders that blocked faces in the background, hands that masked distant and
vital objects. These* were all hazards that no look of mine could detect. He cor¬
rected them with a constant murmur of instructions. While ridding the set of
its wrong nuances of light and shade, Lee also watched the grouping of figures
and carried the cutting of the picture in his head. He knew the moods of space,
the value of planes, the dynamics of symmetry as well as any painting master.
And all this wisdom went into his pointing of the camera.
Working with Lee, I became aware of the other fine talents that are part of
movie making. The gaffer, or head electrician, taking his orders from Garmes
was a fellow as fond of his work and as full of technical skill. Carpenters, prop
men, painters, special-effects men all moved about with quick and economic ges¬
tures. They were as removed from laborers as the master craftsmen working
beside Cellini in his silver smithy. As director of the movie being shot, I was the
final word on all matters. But I would sit by silent and full of admiration as Lee
and his overalled magicians prepared the set for my “direction.” My job seemed
to me little more than putting a frame on a finished canvas.
A Visit from Scarface
My first dealing with Myron involved going to work for Howard Hughes. I told
Myron I didn’t trust Mr. Hughes as an employer. I would work for him only if
he paid me a thousand dollars every day at six o’clock. In that way I stood to
waste only a day’s labor if Mr. Hughes turned out to be insolvent.
Myron was pleased by my attitude and put the deal over with dispatch. The
work I did for Hughes was a movie called Scarface. News that it was a biographical
study of Al Capone brought two Capone henchmen to Hollywood to make cer¬
tain that nothing derogatory about the great gangster reached the screen. The
two henchmen called on me at my hotel. It was after midnight. They entered
the room as ominously as any pair of movie gangsters, their faces set in scowls
and guns bulging their coats. They had a copy of my Sea face script in their hands.
Their dialogue belonged in it.
“You the guy who wrote this?” I said I was.
“We read it.” I inquired how they had liked it.
“We wanna ask you some questions.” I invited them to go ahead.
£64 Writers
“Is this stuff about Al Capone?”
“God, no,” I said. “I don’t even know Al.”
“Never met him, huh?”
I pointed out I had left Chicago just as Al was coming into prominence.
“I knew Jim Colisimo pretty well,” I said.
“That so?”
“I also knew Mossy Enright and Pete Gentleman.”
“That so? Did you know Deanie?”
“Deanie O’Banion? Sure. I used to ride around with him in his flivver. I also
knew Barney.”
“Which Barney?”
“Barney Grogan—Eighteenth Ward,” I said.
A pause.
“O.K., then. We’ll tell Al this stuff you wrote is aboutthem other guys.”
They started out and halted in the doorway, worried again.
“Ifthis stuff ain’t about Al Capone, why are you callin’ it Scarface ? Everybody’ll
think it’s him.”
“That’s the reason,” I said. “Al is one of the most famous and fascinating men
of our time. If we call the movie Scarface, everybody will want to see it, figur¬
ing it’s about Al. That’s part of the racket we call showmanship.”
My visitors pondered this, and one of them finally said, “I’ll tell Al.” A pause.
“Who’s this fella Howard Hughes?”
“He’s got nothing to do with anything,” I said, speaking truthfully at last. “He’s
the sucker with the money.”
“O.K. The hell with him.”
My visitors left.
Some Gilded Assignments
Writing under handicaps of one sort or another—deadlines to be met, censors
to be outwitted, stars to be unruffled—was normal procedure. Writing to
please a producer who a few years ago had been a garage owner or a necktie
salesman was another of the handicaps. But given a producer literate as Anatole
France, there was still the ugly handicap of having to write somethingthat would
miraculously please forty million people and gross four million dollars. The hand¬
icaps, including this last Liverpool Jump, only added bounce to the job. They
made it always a half-desperate performance. If there was little excitement in
the script, there was more than enough in its preparation to keep me stimulated.
Goldwyn, Selznick and Eddie Mannix of Metro were my favorite handicap
makers. I wrote million-dollar movies for Mannix in a week each. They had to
Ben H ec ht
J6J
be rushed to the camera to catch release dates set long in advance. For Gold-
wyn I rewrote an entire script in two days. It was called Hurricane. Nothing Sa¬
cred, done for Selznick in two weeks, had to be written on trains between New
York and Hollywood.
One of my favorite memories of quickie movie writing is the doing of half
the Gone with the Wind movie. Selznick and Vic Fleming appeared at my bedside
one Sunday morning at dawn. I was employed by Metro at the time, but David
had arranged to borrow me for a week.
After three weeks’ shooting of Gone with the Wind, David had decided his script
was no good and that he needed a new story and a new director. The shooting
had been stopped and the million-dollar cast was now sitting by collecting its
wages in idleness.
The three of us arrived at the Selznick studio a little after sunrise. We had
settled on my wages on the way over. I was to receive fifteen thousand dollars
for the week’s work, and no matter what happened I was not to work longer
than a week. I knew in advance that two weeks of such toil as lay ahead might
be fatal.
Four Selznick secretaries who had not yet been to sleep that night staggered
in with typewriters, paper and a gross of pencils. Twenty-four-hour work shifts
were quite common under David’s baton. David himself sometimes failed to go
to bed for several nights in a row. He preferred to wait till he collapsed on his
office couch. Medication was often necessary to revive him.
David was outraged to learn I had not read Gone with the Wind, but decided
there was no time for me to read the long novel. The Selznick overhead on the
idle Wind stages was around fifty thousand dollars a day. David announced that
he knew the book by heart and that he would brief me on it. For the next hour
I listened to David recite its story. I had seldom heard a more involved plot. My
verdict was that nobody could make a remotely sensible movie out of it. Flem¬
ing, who was reputed to be part Indian, sat brooding at his own council fires. I
asked him if he had been able to follow the story David had told. He said no. I
suggested then that we make up a new story, to which David replied with vio¬
lence that every literate human in the United States except me had read Miss
Mitchell’s book, and we would have to stick to it. I argued that surely in two
years of preparation someone must have wangled a workable plot out of Miss
Mitchell’s Ouidalike flight into the Civil War. David suddenly remembered the
first “treatment,” discarded three years before. It had been written by Sidney
Howard, since dead. After an hour of searching, a lone copy of Howard’s work
was run down in an old safe. David read it aloud. We listened to a precise and
telling narrative of Gone with the Wind.
We toasted the dead craftsman and fell to work. Being privy to the book,
Selznick and Fleming discussed each of Howard’s scenes and informed me of
j66 Writers
the habits and general psychology of the characters. They also acted out the
scenes, David specializing in the parts of Scarlett and her drunken father and Vic
playing Rhett Butler and a curious fellow 1 could never understand called Ash¬
ley. He was always forgiving his beloved Scarlett for betraying him with another
of his rivals. David insisted that he was a typical Southern gentleman and refused
flatly to drop him out of the movie.
After each scene had been discussed and performed, I sat down at the type¬
writer and wrote it out. Selznick and Fleming, eager to continue with their
acting, kept hurrying me. We worked in this fashion for seven days, putting in
eighteen to twenty hours a day. Selznick refused to let us each lunch, arguing
that food would slow us up. He provided bananas and salted peanuts. On the
fourth day a blood vessel in Fleming’s right eye broke, giving him more of an
Indian look than ever. On the fifth day Selznick toppled into a torpor while chew¬
ing on a banana. The wear and tear on me was less, for I had been able to lie on
the couch and half doze while the two darted about acting. Thus on the seventh
day I had completed, unscathed, the first nine reels of the Civil War epic.
Many of the handicaps attending script writing I invented without anyone’s
aid. I often undertook to do two or more movies at the same time. Once I did
four simultaneously, writing two of them with Lederer, one with Quentin
Reynolds and one by myself. The house in Oceanside where this mass compo¬
sition went on swarmed with secretaries, and producers motored down from
Beverly Hills to spy on me. Lederer and I had small time for our favorite di¬
versions, which were Klabiash, badminton, horseshoes on the beach and cook¬
ing up Napoleonic schemes for getting rich without effort.
Farewell, Soldier
1 knew few actors and actresses well in Hollywood. Adventures and work shared
with actors are not enough to make friendships. Actors are modest and warm¬
hearted but they remain stubbornly in their own world. One of the few excep¬
tions was Jack Gilbert. He became a friend, suddenly. We met at a dinner party
and Jack came home with me and talked all night.
In the time of Hollywood’s most glittering days, he glittered the most. He
received ten thousand dollars a week and could keep most of it. He lived in a
castle on top of a hill. Thousands of letters poured in daily telling him how won¬
derful he was. The caliphs for whom he worked bowed before him as before a
reigning prince. They built him a “dressing room” such as no actor ever had. It
was a small Italian palace. There were no enemies in his life. He was as un-
snobbish as a happy child. He went wherever he was invited. He needed no great¬
ness around him to make him feel distinguished. He drank with carpenters,
Ben Hecht
J67
danced with waitresses and made love to whores and movie queens alike. He
swaggered and posed but it was never to impress anyone. He was being Jack
Gilbert, prince, butterfly, Japanese lantern and the spirit of romance.
One night Jack sat in a movie theater and heard the audience laugh at him in
a picture. It was his first talkie. His squeaky boy’s voice accompanying his
derring-do gestures turned him into a clown.
After the preview the Metro caliphs decided not to use him again. His con¬
tract for ten thousand a week still had many years to run. He would draw his
salary and remain idle.
Jack called in three vocal coaches. He worked two hours a day with each of
them. He started breaking into the front offices crying out, “Listen to me now.
I can talk.” And he recited passages from Shakespeare andthepoets. The caliphs
remembered the laughter in the theater and waved him away.
One day he entered Walter Wanger’s office, fell on his knees and pleaded
for the male lead in Queen Christina. Garbo, one of his former leading ladies, was
being starred in it.
“Listen to me talk,” said Jack. “It’s a real voice, a man’s voice.” Tears fell from
his eyes.
Wanger gave him the lead. Gilbert played it well, but the movie failed to bring
him back to fame. The Gilbert voice no longer made audiences laugh. It left
them, however, unimpressed. Jack played in no more pictures. He became a
ten-thousand-dollar-a-week beachcomber. He strutted around the movie lot and
gave drinking parties in his Italian-palace dressing room. There was no gloom
visible in him. He played Jack Gilbert to a small audience of masseurs, fencing
and boxing instructors, vocal coaches, barkers, whores, hangers-on and a few
friends.
One rainy afternoon I called on him in his dressing room. He was lying down
on one of his five-thousand-dollar beds reading one of my books. He asked me
to autograph it. Iwrote in it, “To Jack Gilbert—Dumas loaned him amustache.”
I regretted the sentence as soon as I put it down. Jack grinned as he looked at
it. “So true,” he said. “Can you have dinner with me tonight?”
The rain became a tropic storm. Four of us drove out to Gilbert’s house on
Malibu Beach. MacArthur was one of the guests. Another was one of Jack’s
staunchest friends, Dick Hyland, the athlete and sports writer.
We drank and told stories after dinner. The wind howled in the night and
the dark sea came crashing almost up to the windows. Gilbert was silent. He sat
drinking and smiling at us. At eleven o’clock he sprang to his feet.
“I’ve got a date,” he said. “I’m swimming out and returning a mustache to
Dumas. Good-by—everybody—sweethearts and sonsobitches, all.”
He waved a bottle of liquor at us and was gone. We saw him for a moment
racing in the storm toward the roaring ocean. No one moved.
j 6 8 Writers
“For God’s sake!” young Hyland said. “He’s gone to drown himself!”
Hyland watched the storm for a few minutes and then left to find Jack. He
returned in an hour, drenched and wearied. We were still drinking and talking.
“I couldn’t find him,” Hyland said. “He’s gone.”
1 looked at MacArthur and asked, “What do you think, Charlie?”
“I don’t know,” said my friend, “but if a man wants to kill himself that’s his
privilege. Everybody destroys himself sooner or later.”
MacArthur stood up unsteadily. He had remembered a phrase out of the Bible,
which was always half-open in his head.
“A man fell in Israel,” he quoted, and resumed his drinking.
The noises of the storm filled the room. The door opened suddenly. Rain and
wind rushed in. A dripping Jack Gilbert stood weaving in the doorway. He
grinned and tried to speak. Instead he vomited, and fell on the floor.
“Always the silent star,” said MacArthur.
I thought of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of the Steadfast Tin Soldier.
He had been swept away to sea in a paper boat, and in his ears as he was drown¬
ing had sounded the voice of one he loved.
Farewell, soldier, true and brave,
Nothing now thy life can save.
A few months later Gilbert went to a gay Hollywood party. While he was
dancing with a movie queen, his toupee fell off. Amid shouts of laugher he re¬
trieved it from under the dancers’ feet. He was found dead the next morning
in bed—in his castle on the hill.
Gore Vidal
The auteur theory has not found many fans among writers, who believe that the director
is at best the coauthor of a film. Gore Vidal, who has worked more in Hollywood, both
credited and uncredited, than almost any other serious writer, has made a point of in-
sistin g that he, not director Franklin J. Schaffner, was the primary author of thefilm The
Best Man. Here he provides a tour of the rise of the auteur theory, explains its short¬
comings, prepares the ground for a reevaluation of the writer’s role, and tells many won-
Gore Vidal
S 69
derful anecdotes. (He can be seen retelling the most memorable, about bis quickj'ixjor the
Ben-Hur screenplay, in The Celluloid Closet, a 1 995 documentary about hidden and
implied homosexuality in Hollywood movies during the Production Code days and after.)
“Who Makes the Movies?”
Forty-nine years ago last October Al Jolson not only filled with hideous song
the sound track of a film called The Jazz Singer, he also spoke. With the words
“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” (surely the most menacing line in the history of
world drama), the age of the screen director came to an end and the age of the
screenwriter began.
Until 1927, the director was king, turning out by the mile his “molds oflight”
(Andre Bazin’s nice phrase). But once the movies talked, the director as creator
became secondary to the writer. Even now, except for an occasional director-
writer like Ingmar Bergman,* the director tends to be the one interchangeable
(if not entirely expendable) element in the making of a film. After all, there are
thousands of movie teclmicians who can do what a director is supposed to do
because, in fact, collectively (and sometimes individually) they actually do do
his work behind the camera and in the cutter’s room. On the other hand, there
is no film without a written script.
In the Fifties when I came to MGM as a contract writer and took my place at
the Writers’ Table in the commissary, the Wise Hack used to tell us newcom¬
ers, “The director is the brother-in-law.” Apparently the ambitious man became
a producer (that’s where the power was). The talented man became a writer
(that’s where the creation was). The pretty man became a star.
Even before Jolson spoke, the director had begun to give way to the producer,
Director Lewis Milestone saw the writing on the screen as early as 1923 when
“baby producer” Irving Thalberg fired the legendary director Erich von Stroheim
from his film Merry Go Round. “That,” wrote Milestone somberly in New Theater
and Film (March 1937), “was the beginning of the storm and the end of the reign
of the director. ...” Even as late as 1950 the star Dick Powell assured the film
cutter Robert Parrish that “anybody can direct a movie, even I could do it. I’d
rather not because it would take too much time. I can make more money act¬
ing, selling real estate and playing the market.” That was pretty much the way
♦Questions I am advised to anticipate: What about such true auteurs du cinema as Truffaut? Well, Jules et Jim was a
novel by Henri-Pierre Roche. Did Truffaut adapt the screenplay by himself? No, he worked with Jean Gruault.
Did Bunuel create The Exterminating Angel ? No, it was “suggested" by an unpublished play by Jose Bergamin. Did
Bunuel take it from there? No, he had as co-author Luis Alcorisa. So it goes.
tVr iters
S7°
the director was viewed in the Thirties and Forties, the so-called classic age of
the talking movie.
Although the essential creator of the classic Hollywood film was the writer,
the actual master of the film was the producer, as Scott Fitzgerald recognized
when he took as protagonist for his last novel Irving Thalberg. Although Thal-
berg himself was a lousy movie-maker, he was the head of production at MGM;
and in those days MGM was a kind of Vatican where the chief of production was
Pope, holding in his fists the golden keys of Schenck. The staff producers were
the College of Cardinals. The movie stars were holy and valuable objects to be
bought, borrowed, stolen. Like icons, they were moved from sound stage to
sound stage, studio to studio, film to film, bringing in their wake good fortune
and gold.
With certain exceptions (Alfred Hitchcock, for one), the directors were, at
worst, brothers-in-law; at best, bright technicians. All in all, they were a cheery,
unpretentious lot, and if anyone had told them that they were auteurs du cinema,
few could have coped with the concept, much less the French. They were tech¬
nicians; proud commercialities, happy to serve what was optimistically known
as The Industry.
This state of affairs lasted until television replaced the movies as America’s
principal dispenser of mass entertainment. Overnight the producers lost con¬
trol of what was left of The Industry and, unexpectedly, the icons took charge.
Apparently, during all those years when we thought the icons nothing more than
beautiful painted images of all our dreams and lusts, they had been not only alive
but secretly greedy for power and gold.
“The lunatics are running the asylum,” moaned the Wise Hack at the Writ¬
ers’ Table, but soldiered on. Meanwhile, the icons started to produce, direct,
even write. For a time, they were able to ignore the fact that with television on
the rise, no movie star could outdraw the “$64,000 Question.” During this tran¬
sitional decade, the director was still the brother-in-law. But instead of marry¬
ing himself off to a producer, he shacked up, as it were, with an icon. For a time
each icon had his or her favorite director and The Industry was soon on the rocks.
Then out of France came the dreadful news: all those brothers-in-law of the
classic era were really autonomous and original artists. Apparently each had his
own style that impressed itself on every frame of any film he worked on. Proof?
Since the director was the same person from film to film, each image of his oeu¬
vre must then be stamped with his authorship. The argument was circular but
no less overwhelming in its implications. Much quoted was Giraudoux’s solemn
inanity: “There are no works, there are only auteurs. ”
The often wise Andre Bazin eventually ridiculed this notion in La Politique des
Auteurs, but the damage was done in the pages of the magazine he founded, Cahiers
du cinema. The fact that, regardless of director, every Warner Brothers film dur-
Gore Vidal
57i
ing the classic age had a dark look owing to the Brothers’ passion for saving money
in electricity and set-dressing cut no ice with ambitious critics on the prowl for
high art in a field once thought entirely low.
In 1948, Bazin’s disciple Alexandre Astruc wrote the challenging "La Came¬
ra-stylo. ’’This manifesto advanced the notion that the director is—or should be—
the true and solitary creator of a movie, “penning” his film on celluloid. Astruc
thought that camera-stylo could
tackle any subject any genre. ... I will even go so far as to say that contempo¬
rary ideas and philosophies of life are such that only the cinema can do justice to
them. Maurice Nadeau wrote in an article in the newspaper Combat: “If Descartes
lived today, he would write novels.” With all due respect to Nadeau, a Descartes
of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm cam¬
era and some film, and would be writing his philosophy on film: for his Discours
de la Methode would today be of such a kind that only the cinema could express it
satisfactorily.
With all due respect to Astruc, the cinema has many charming possibilities but
it cannot convey complex ideas through words or even, paradoxically, dialogue
in the Socratic sense. Le Genou de Claire is about as close as we shall ever come
to dialectic in a film and though Rohmer’s work has its delights, the ghost of
Descartes is not very apt to abandon the marshaling of words on a page for the
flickering shadows of talking heads. In any case, the Descartes of Astruc’s pe¬
riod did not make a film; he wrote the novel La Nausee.
But the would-be camera-writers are not interested in philosophy or history
or literature. They want only to acquire for the cinema the prestige of ancient
forms without having first to crack the code. “Let’s face it,” writes Astruc:
between the pure cinema of the 19 20s and filmed theater, there is plenty of room
for a different and individual kind of film-making.
This of course implies that the scriptwriter directs his own scripts; or rather,
that the scriptwriter ceases to exist, for in this kind of film-making the distinc¬
tion between author and director loses all meaning. Direction is no longer a means
of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing.
It is curious that despite Astrue’s fierce will to eliminate the scriptwriter (and
perhaps literature itself), he is forced to use terms from the art form he would
like to supersede. For him the film director uses a pen with which he writes in
order to become—highest praise—an author.
As the French theories made their way across the Atlantic, bemused brothers-
in-law found themselves being courted by odd-looking French youths with tape
recorders. Details of long-forgotten Westerns were recalled and explicated.
£7 2 Writers
Every halting word from the auteur’s lips was taken down and reverently ex¬
amined. The despised brothers-in-law of the Thirties were now Artists. With
newfound confidence, directors started inking major pacts to meg superstar
thesps whom the meggers could control as hyphenates: that is, as director-
producers or even as writer-director-producers. Although the icons continued
to be worshiped and overpaid, the truly big deals were now made by directors.
To them, also, went the glory. For all practical purposes the producer has ei¬
ther vanished from the scene (the “package” is now put together by a “talent”
agency) or merged with the director. Meanwhile, the screenwriter continues
to be the prime creator of the talking film, and though he is generally paid very
well and his name is listed right after that of the director in the movie reviews
of Time, he is entirely in the shadow of the director just as the director was once
in the shadow of the producer and the star.
What do directors actually do? What do screenwriters do? This is difficult to
explain to those who have never been involved in the making of a film. It is par¬
ticularly difficult when French theoreticians add to the confusion by devising false
hypotheses (studio director as auteur in the Thirties) on which to build irrele¬
vant and misleading theories. Actually, if Astruc and Bazin had wanted to be truly
perverse (and almost accurate), they would have declared that the cameraman
is the auteur of any film. They could then have ranked James Wong Howe with
Dante, Braque, and Gandhi. Cameramen do tend to have styles in a way that
the best writers do but most directors don’t—style as opposed to preoccupa¬
tion. Gregg Toland’s camera work is a vivid fact from film to film, linking Cit¬
izen Kane to Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives in a way that one cannot link
Citizen Kane to, say, Welles’s Confidential Report. Certainly the cameraman is usu¬
ally more important than the director in the day-to-day making of a film as op¬
posed to the preparation of a film .Oncethefilmisshotthe editor becomes the
principal interpreter of the writer’s invention.
Since there are few reliable accounts of the making of any of the classic talk¬
ing movies, Pauline Kael’s book on the making of Citizen Kane is a valuable doc¬
ument. In considerable detail she establishes the primacy in that enterprise of
the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. The story of how Orson Welles saw to
it that Mankiewicz became, officially, the noncreator of his own film is grimly
fascinating and highly typical of the way so many director-hustlers acquire for
themselves the writer’s creation.* Few directors in this area possess the mod¬
esty of Kurosawa, who said, recently, “With a very good script, even a second-
class director may make a first-class film. But with a bad script even a first-class
director cannot make a really first-class film.”
♦Peter Bogdanovich maintains that Kael’s version o f the making o f Citizen Kane is not only inaccurate but highly
unfair to Orson Welles, a master whom I revere.
Gore Vidal
S71
A useful if necessarily superficial look at the way movies were written in the clas¬
sic era can be found in the pages of Some Time in the Sun. The author, Mr. Tom
Dardis, examines the movie careers of five celebrated writers who took jobs as
movie-writers. They are Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner,
Nathanael West, and James Agee.
Mr. Dardis’ approach to his writers and to the movies is that of a deeply se¬
rious and highly concerned lowbrow, a type now heavily tenured in American
Academe. He writesof“literate”dialogue,“massive”biographies. Magisterially,
he misquotes Henry James on the subject of gold. More seriously, he misquotes
Joan Crarford. She did not say to Fitzgerald, “Work hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, work
hard!” when he was preparing a film for her. She said “Write hard. ...” There
are many small inaccuracies that set on edge the film buff s teeth. For instance,
Mr. Dardis thinks that the hotel on Sunset Boulevard known, gorgeously, as The
Garden of Allah is “now demolished and reduced to the status of a large park¬
ing lot. . . .” Well, it is not a parking lot. Hollywood has its own peculiar rev¬
erence for the past. The Garden of Allah was replaced by a bank that subtly
suggests in glass and metal the mock-Saracen fagade of the hotel that once housed
Scott Fitzgerald. Mr. Dardis also thinks that the hotel was “demolished” during
World War II. I stayed there in the late Fifties, right next door to fun-loving,
bibulous Errol Flynn.
Errors and starry-eyed vulgarity to one side, Mr. Dardis has done a good deal
of interesting research on how films were written and made in those days. For
one thing, he catches the ambivalence felt by the writers who had descended
(but only temporarily) from literature’s Parnassus to the swampy marketplace
of the movies. There was a tendency to play Lucifer. One was thought to have
sold out. “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven,” was more than once
quoted—well, paraphrased—at the Writers’ Table. We knew we smelled of
sulphur. Needless to say, most of the time it was a lot of fun if the booze didn’t
get you.
For the Parnassian writer the movies were not just a means of making easy
money; even under the worst conditions, movies were genuinely interesting to
write. Mr. Dardis is at his best when he shows his writers taking seriously their
various “assignments.” The instinct to do good work is hard to eradicate.
Faulkner was the luckiest (and the most cynical) of Mr. Dardis’ five. For one
thing, he usually worked with Howard Hawks, a director who might actually
qualify as an auteur. Hawks was himself a writer and he had a strong sense of how
to manipulate those cliches that he could handle best. Together Faulkner and
Hawks created a pair of satisfying movies, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep.
But who did what? Apparently there is not enough remaining evidence (at least
574
Writers
available to Mr. Dardis) to sort out authorship. Also, Faulkner’s public line was
pretty much: I’m just a hired hand who does what he’s told.
Nunnally Johnson (as quoted by Mr. Dardis) found Hawks’s professional re¬
lationship with Faulkner mysterious. “It may be that he simply wanted his name
attached to Faulkner’s. Or since Hawks liked to write it was easy to do it with
Faulkner, for Bill didn’t care much one way or the other. ... We shall proba¬
bly never know just how much Bill cared about any of the scripts he worked on
with Hawks.” Yet it is interesting to note that Johnson takes it entirely for
granted that the director wants—and must get —all credit for a film.
Problem for the director: how to get a script without its author? Partial so¬
lution: of all writers, the one who does not mind anonymity is the one most apt
to appeal to an ambitious director. When the studio producer was king, he used
to minimize the writer’s role by assigning a dozen writers to a script. No di¬
rector today has the resources of the old studios. But he can hire a writer who
doesn’t“care much one way or the other.” He can also put his name on the screen
as co-author (standard procedure in Italy and France). Even the noble Jean
Renoir played this game when he came to direct The Southerner. Faulkner not
only wrote the script, he liked the project. The picture’s star Zachary Scott has
said that the script was entirely Faulkner’s. But then, other hands were engaged
and “the whole problem,” according to Mr. Dardis, “of who did what was nearly
solved by Renoir’s giving himself sole credit for the screenplay—the best way
possible for an auteur director to label his films.”
Unlike Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald cared deeply about movies; he wanted to
make a success of movie-writing and, all in all, if Mr. Dardis is to be believed
(and for what it may be worth, his account of Fitzgerald’s time in the sun tal¬
lies with what one used to hear), he had a far better and more healthy time of
it in Hollywood than is generally suspected.
Of a methodical nature, Fitzgerald ran a lot of films at the studio. (Unlike
Faulkner, who affected to respond only to Mickey Mouse and Pathe News).
Fitzgerald made notes. He also did what an ambitious writer must do if he wants
to write the sort of movie he himself might want to see: he made friends with
the producers. Rather censoriously, Mr. Dardis notes Fitzgerald’s “clearly stated
intention to work with film producers rather than with film directors, here
downgraded to the rank of ‘collaborators.’ Actually, Fitzgerald seems to have
had no use whatsoever for directors as such.” But neither did anyone else.
During much of this time Howard Hawks, say, was a low-budget director
known for the neatness and efficiency of his work. Not until the French beati¬
fied him twenty years later did he appear to anyone as an original artist instead
of just another hired technician. It is true that Hawks was allowed to work with
writers, but then, he was at Warner Brothers, a frontier outpost facing upon
barbarous Burbank. At MGM, the holy capital, writers and directors did not get
Gore Vidal
575
much chance to work together. It was the producer who worked with the
writer, and Scott Fitzgerald was an MGM writer. Even as late as my own years
at MGM (1956—1958), the Final script was the writer’s creation (under the pro¬
ducer’s supervision). The writer even pre-empted the director’s most impor¬
tant function by describing each camera shot: Long, Medium, Close, and the
director was expected faithfully to follow the writer’s score.
One of the most successful directors at MGM during this period was George
Cukor. In an essay on “The Director” (1938), Cukor reveals the game as it used
to be played. “In most case,” he writes, “the director makes his appearance very
early in the life story of a motion picture.” I am sure that this was often the case
with Cukor but the fact that he thinks it necessary to mention “early” participa¬
tion is significant.
There are times when the whole idea for a film may come from [the director],
but in a more usual case he makes his entry when he is summoned by a producer
and it is suggested that he should be the director of a proposed story.
Not only was this the most usual way but, very often, the director left the
producer’s presence with the finished script under his arm. Cukor does describe
his own experience working with writers but Cukor was something of a star at
the studio. Most directors were “summoned” by the producer and told what to
do. It is curious, incidentally, how entirely the idea of the working producer has
vanished. He is no longer remembered except as the butt of familiar stories: frag¬
ile artist treated cruelly by insensitive cigar-smoking producer—or Fitzgerald
savaged yet again by Joe Mankiewicz.
Of Mr. Dardis’ five writers, James Agee is, to say the least, the lightest in
literary weight. But he was a passionate film-goer and critic. He was a child of
the movies just as Huxley was a child of Meredith and Peacock. Given a differ¬
ent temperament, luck, birthdate, Agee might have been the first American cin¬
ema auteur: a writer who wrote screenplays in such a way that, like the score of
a symphony, they needed nothing more than a conductor’s interpretation, . . .
an interpretation he could have provided himself and perhaps would have pro¬
vided if he had lived.
Agee’s screenplays were remarkably detailed. “All the shots,” writes Mr.
Dardis, “were set down with extreme precision in a way that no other screen¬
writer had ever set things down before. . . .” This is exaggerated. Most screen¬
writers of the classic period wrote highly detailed scripts in order to direct the
director but, certainly, the examples Mr. Dardis gives of Agee’s screenplays
show them to be remarkably visual. Most of us hear stories. He saw them, too.
But I am not so sure that what he saw was the reflection of a living reality in his
head. As with many of today’s young directors, Agee’s memory was crowded
j 7 6 Writers
with memories not oflife but of old films. For Agee, rain falling was not a mem¬
ory of April at Exeter but a scene recalled from Eisenstein. This is particularly
noticeable in the adaptation Agee made of Stephen Crane’s The Blue Hotel,
which, Mr. Dardis tells us, no “film director has yet taken on, although it has
been televised twice, each time with a different director and cast and with the
Agee script cut to the bone, being used only as a guidepost to the story.” This
is nonsense. In 19^4, CBS hired me to adapt The Blue Hotel. I worked directly
from Stephen Crane and did not know that James Agee had never adapted it until
I read Some Time in the Sun.
At the mention of any director’s name, the Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table
would bark out a percentage, representing how much, in his estimate, a given
director would subtract from the potential 100 percent of the script he was di¬
recting. The thought that a director might add something worthwhile never
crossed the good gray Hack’s mind. Certainly he would have found hilarious
David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film, whose haphazard pages are
studded with tributes to directors.
Mr. Thomson has his own pleasantly eccentric pantheon in which writers fig¬
ure hardly at all. A column is devoted to the dim Micheline Presle but the finest
of all screenwriters, Jacques Prevert, is ignored. There is a long silly tribute to
Arthur Penn; yet there is no biography of Penn’s contemporary at NBC televi¬
sion, Paddy Chayefsky, whose films in the Fifties and early Sixties were far more
interesting than anything Penn has done. Possibly Chayefsky was excluded be¬
cause not only did he write his own films, he would then hire a director rather
the way one would employ a plumber—or a cameraman. For a time, Chayef¬
sky was the only American auteur, and his pencil was the director. Certainly
Chayefsky’s early career in films perfectly disproves Nicholas Ray’s dictum (ap¬
provingly quoted by Mr. Thomson): “If it were all in the script, why make the
film?” If it is not all in the script, there is no film to make.
Twenty years ago at the Writers’ Table we all agreed with the Wise Hack
that William Wyler subtracted no more than 1 o percent from a script. Some of
the most attractive and sensible of Bazin’s pages are devoted to Wyler’s work
in the Forties. On the other hand, Mr. Thomson does not like him at all (be¬
cause Wyler lacks those redundant faults that create the illusion of a Style?). Yet
whatever was in a script, Wyler rendered faithfully: when he was given a bad
script, he would make not only a bad movie, but the script’s particular kind of
badness would be revealed in a way that could altogether too easily boomerang
on the too skillful director. But when the script was good (of its kind, of its kind!),
The Letter, say, or The Little Foxes, there was no better interpreter.
At MGM, I worked exclusively with the producer Sam Zimbalist. He was a
remarkably good and decent man in a business where such qualities are rare. He
was also a producer of the old-fashioned sort. This meant that the script was pre-
Gore Vidal
S 77
pared for him an d with him. Once the script was ready, the director was sum¬
moned; he would then have the chance to say, yes, he would direct the script
or, no, he wouldn’t. Few changes were made in the script after the director was
assigned. But this was not to be the case in Zimbalist’s last film.
For several years MGM had been planning a remake of Ben-Hur, the studio’s
most successful silent film. A Contract Writer wrote a script; it was discarded.
Then Zimbalist offered me the job. I said no, and went on suspension. During
the next year or two S. N. Behrman and Maxwell Anderson, among others,
added many yards of portentous dialogue to a script which kept growing and
changing. The result was not happy. By 1958 MGM was going bust. Suddenly
the remake of Ben-Hur seemed like a last chance to regain the mass audience lost
to television. Zimbalist again asked me if I would take on the job. I said that if
the studio released me from the remainder of my contract, I would go to Rome
for two or three months and rewrite the script. The studio agreed. Meanwhile,
Wyler had been signed to direct.
On a chilly March day Wyler, Zimbalist, and I took an overnight flight from
New York. On the plane Wyler read for the first time the latest of the many
scripts. As we drove together into Rome from the airport, Wyler looked gray
and rather frightened. “This is awful,” he said, indicating the huge script that I
had placed between us on the back seat. “I know,” I said. “What are we going
to do?”
Wyler groaned: “These Romans. . . . Do you know anything about them?”
I said, yes, I had done my reading. Wyler stared at me. “Well,” he said, “when
a Roman sits down and relaxes, what does he unbuckle?”
That spring I rewrote more than half the script (and Wyler studied every
“Roman” film ever made). When I was finished with a scene, I would give it to
Zimbalist. We would go over it. Then the scene would be passed on to Wyler.
Normally, Wyler is slow and deliberately indecisive; but first-century Jerusalem
had been built at enormous expense; the first day of shooting was approaching;
the studio was nervous. As a result, I did not often hear Wyler’s famous cry, as
he would hand you back your script, “If I knew what was wrong with it, I’d fix
it myself.”
The plot of Ben-Hur is, basically, absurd and any attempt to make sense of it
would destroy the story’s awful integrity. But for a film to be watchable the char¬
acters must make some kind of psychological sense. We were stuck with the fol¬
lowing: the Jew Ben-Hur and the Roman Messala were friends in childhood.
Then they were separated. Now the adult Messala returns to Jerusalem; meets
Ben-Hur; asks him to help with the Romanization of Judea. Ben-Hur refuses;
there is a quarrel; they part and vengeance is sworn. This one scene is the sole
motor that must propel a very long story until Jesus Christ suddenly and point-
lessly drifts onto the scene, automatically untying some of the cruder knots in
£78 Writers
the plot. Wyler and I agreed that a single political quarrel would not turn into
a lifelong vendetta.
I thought of a solution, which I delivered into Wyler’s good ear. “As boys
they were lovers. Now Messala wants to continue the affair. Ben-Hur rejects
him. Messala is furious. Chagrin d’amour, the classic motivation for murder.”
Wyler looked at me as if I had gone mad. “But we can’t do that\ I mean this
is Ben-Hur! My God. . . .”
“We won’t really do it. We just suggest it. I’ll write the scenes so that they
will make sense to those who are tuned in. Those who aren’t will still feel that
Messaila’s rage is somehow emotionally logical.”
I don’t think Wyler particularly liked my solution but he agreed that “any¬
thing is better than what we’ve got. So let’s try it.”
I broke the original scene into two parts. Charlton Heston (Ben-Hur) and
Stephen Boyd (Messala) read them for us in Zimbalist’s office. Wyler knew his
actors. He warned me: “Don’t ever tell Chuck what it’s all about, or he’ll fall
apart.”* I suspect that Heston does not know to this day what luridness we man¬
aged to contrive around him. But Boyd knew: every time he looked at Ben-Hur
it was like a starving man getting a glimpse of dinner through a pane of glass.
And so, among the thundering hooves and cliches of the last (to date) Ben-Hur,
there is something odd and authentic in one unstated relationship.
As agreed, I left in early summer and Christopher Fry wrote the rest of the
script. Before the picture ended, Zimbalist died of a heart attack. Later, when
it came time to credit the writers of the film, Wyler proposed that Fry be given
screen credit. Then Fry insisted that I be given credit with him, since I had writ¬
ten the first half of the picture. Wyler was in a quandary. Only Zimbalist (and
Fry and myself—two interested parties) knew who had written what, and Zim¬
balist was dead. The matter was given to the Screenwriters Guild for arbitra¬
tion and they, mysteriously, awarded the credit to the Contract Writer whose
script was separated from ours by at least two other discarded scripts. The film
was released in 1959 (not 19^9—1960, as my edition of The Filmgoer’s Compan¬
ion by Leslie Halliwell states) and saved MGM from financial collapse.
I have recorded in some detail this unimportant business to show the near¬
impossibility of determining how a movie is actually created. Had Ben-Hur been
taken seriously by, let us say, those French critics who admire Johnny Guitar, then
Wyler would have been credited with the unusually subtle relationship between
Ben-Hur and Messala. No credit would ever have gone to me because my name
was not on the screen, nor would credit have gone to the official scriptwriter
because, according to the auteur theory, every aspect of a film is the creation of
the director.
♦Wyler now denies that I ever told him what I was up to. It is possible that these conversations took place with
Zimbalist but I doubt it. Anyway, the proof is on the screen.
Gore Vidal
S 79
The twenty-year interregnum when the producer was supreme is now a
memory. The ascendancy of the movie stars was brief. The directors have now
regained their original primacy, and Milestone’s storm is only an echo. Today
the marquees of movie houses feature the names of directors and journalists (“A
work of art ,” J. Crist); the other collaborators are in fine print.
This situation might be more acceptable if the film directors had become true
auteurs. But most of them are further than ever away from art—not to mention
life. The majority are simply technicians. A few have come from the theatre;
many began as editors, cameramen, makers of television series, and commer¬
cials; in recent years, ominously, a majority have been graduates of film schools.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with a profound understanding of the tech¬
nical means by which an image is impressed upon celluloid. But movies are not
just molds of light any more than a novel is just inked-over paper. A movie is a
response to reality in a certain way and that way must first be found by a writer.
Unfortunately, no contemporary film director can bear to be thought a mere
interpreter. He must be sole creator. As a result, he is more often than not a
plagiarist, telling stories that are not his.
Over the years a number of writers have become directors, but except for
such rare figures as Cocteau and Bergman, the writers who have gone in for di¬
recting were generally not much better at writing than they proved to be at di¬
recting. Even in commercial terms, for every Joe Mankiewicz or Preston Sturges
there are a dozen Xs and Ys, not to mention the depressing Z.
Today’s films are more than ever artifacts of light. Cars chase one another
mindlessly along irrelevant freeways. Violence seems rooted in a notion about
what ought to happen next on the screen to help the images move rather than
in any human situation anterior to those images. In fact, the human situation has
been eliminated not through any intentional philosophic design but because
those who have spent too much time with cameras and machines seldom have
much apprehension of that living world without whose presence there is no art.
I suspect that the time has now come to take Astruc seriously . . . after first
rearranging his thesis. Astruc’s camera-stylo requires that“the script writer ceases
to exist. . . . The filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes
with his pen.” Good. But let us eliminate not the screenwriter but that technician-
hustler—the director (a.k.a. auteur du cinema ). Not until he has been replaced
by those who can use a pen to write from life for the screen is there going to be
much of anything worth seeing. Nor does it take a genius of a writer to achieve
great effects in film. Compared to the works of his nineteenth-century mentors,
the writing of Ingmar Bergman is second-rate. But when he writes straight
through the page and onto the screen itself his talent is transformed and the re¬
sult is often first-rate.
As a poet, Jacques Prevert is not in the same literary class as Valery, but
Prevert’s films Les Enfants du Paradis and Lumiere d’ete are extraordinary achieve-
Writers
580
ments. They were also disdained by the French theoreticians of the Forties who
knew perfectly well thatthe directors Came and Gremillon were inferior to their
scriptwriter; but since the Theory requires that only a director can create a film,
any film that is plainly a writer’s work cannot be true cinema. This attitude has
given rise to some highly comic critical musings. Recently a movie critic could
not figure out why there had been such a dramatic change in the quality of the
work of the director Joseph Losey after he moved to England. Was it a differ¬
ence in the culture? the light? the water? Or could it—and the critic faltered—
could it be that perhaps Losey’s films changed when he . . . when he—oh,
dear!—got Harold Pinter to write screenplays for him? The critic promptly dis¬
missed the notion. Mr. Thomson prints no biography of Pinter in his Dictionary.
I have never much liked the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, but I find most in¬
teresting the ease with which he turned to film after some twenty years as poet
and novelist. He could not have been a filmmaker in America because the costs
are too high; also, the technician-hustlers are in total charge. But in Italy, dur¬
ing the Fifties, it was possible for an actual auteur to use for a pen the camera
(having first composed rather than stolen the narrative to be illuminated).
Since the talking movie is closest in form to the novel (“the novel is a narra¬
tive that organizes itself in the world, while the cinema is a world that organizes
itself into a narrative”—Jean Mitry), it strikes me that the rising literary gen¬
eration might think of the movies as, peculiarly, their kind of novel, to be cre¬
ated by them in collaboration with technicians but without the interference of
The Director, that hustler-plagiarist who has for twenty years dominated and
exploited and (occasionally) enhanced an art form still in search of its true au¬
thors.
Christopher. Isherwood
Written in 1945, Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet is one of his less-known novels,
about a writer named Christopher Isherwood who finds himself working in London with a
director who is a refugee from Austria, in 1936, as Hitler’s shadow lengthens. It is in¬
teresting how "Isherwood, ’’who has a reputation as a serious writer, finds the requirements
of a movie potboiler to be daunting and gains a new respect for the skills of those who can
Christopher 1 sherw ood j 8 i
make one work. The real Isherwood (1904—1986) was a British writer who settled in Cal¬
ifornia in 1939 and often used thinly or not disguised versions of himself in hisfiction.
His Berlin Stories inspired the movie Cabaret.
from Prater Violet
One of Chatsworth’s underlings had installed Bergmann in a service flat in
Knightsbridge, not far from Hyde Park Comer. I found him there next morn¬
ing, at the top of several steep flights of stairs. Even before we could see each
other, he began to hail me from above. “Come up! Higher! Higher! Courage!
Not yet! Where are you? Don’t weaken! Aha! At last! Servus, my friend!”
“Well?” I asked, as we shook hands. “How do you like it here?”
“Terrible!” Bergmann twinkled at me comically from under his black bush of
eyebrow. “It’s an inferno! You have made the as-cent to hell.”
This morning, he was no longer an emperor but an old clown, shock-headed,
in his gaudy silk dressing gown. Tragicomic, like all clowns, when you see them
resting backstage after the show.
He laid his hand on my arm. “First, tell me one thing, please. Is your whole
city as horrible as this?”
“Horrible? Why, this is the best part of it! Wait till you see our slums, and
the suburbs.”
Bergmann grinned. “You console me enormously.”
He led the way into the flat. The small living room was tropically hot, under
a heavy cloud of cigarette smoke. It reeked of fresh paint. The whole place was
littered with clothes, papers and books, in explosive disorder, like the debris
around a volcano.
Bergmann called, “Mademoiselle!” and a girl came out of the inner room. She
had fair smooth hair, brushed plainly back from her temples, and a quiet oval
face, which would have looked pretty, if her chin hadn’t been too pointed. She
wore rimless glasses and the wrong shade of lipstick. She was dressed in the neat
jacket and skirt of a stenographer.
“Dorothy, I introduce you to Mr. Isherwood. Dorothy is my secretary, the
most beautiful of all the gifts given me by the munificent Mr. Chatsworth. You
see, Dorothy, Mr. Isherwood is the good Virgil who has come to guide me
through this Anglo-Saxon comedy.”
Dorothy smiled the smile of a new secretary—a bitbewildered still, but pre¬
pared for anything in the way of lunatic employers.
“And please suppress that fire,” Bergmann added. “It definitely kills me.”
j 82
Writers
Dorothy knelt down and turned off the gas fire, which had been roaring away
in a corner. “Do you want me now,” she asked, very businesslike, “or shall 1 be
getting on with the letters?”
“We always want you, my darling. Without you, we could not exist for one
moment. You are our Beatrice. But first, Mr. Virgil and I have to become ac¬
quainted. Or rather, he must become acquainted with me. For, you see,”
Bergmann continued, as Dorothy left the room, “I know everything about you
already.”
“You do?”
“Certainly. Everything that is important. Wait. 1 shall show you something.”
Raising his forefinger, smilingly, to indicate that I must be patient, he began
to rummage among the clothes and scattered papers. I watched with growing
curiosity, as Bergmann’s search became increasingly furious. Now and then, he
would discover some object, evidently not the right one, hold it up before him
for a moment, like a nasty-smelling dead rat, and toss it aside again with a snort
of disgust or some exclamation such as “Abominable!” “Scheusslich!” “Too silly
for words!” I watched him unearth, in this way, a fat black notebook, a shaving
mirror, a bottle of hair tonic and an abdominal belt. Finally, under a pile of shirts,
he found a copy of Mein KampJ which he kissed, before throwing it into the
wastepaper basket. “I love him!” he told me, making a wry, comical face.
The search spread into the bedroom. I could hear him plunging about,
snorting and breathing hard, as 1 stood by the mantelpiece, looking at the pho¬
tographs of a large, blonde, humorous woman and a thin, dark, rather fright¬
ened girl. Next, the bathroom was explored. A couple of wet towels were flung
out into the passage. Then Bergmann uttered a triumphant “Aha!” He strode
back into the living room, waving a book above his head. It was my novel, The
Memorial.
“So! Here we are! You see? I read it at midnight. And again this morning, in
my bath.”
I was absurdly pleased and flattered. “Well,” I tried to sound casual, “how
did you like it?”
“I found it grandiose.”
“It ought to have been much better. I’m afraid I . .
“You are wrong,” Bergmann told me, quite severely. He began to turn the
pages. “This scene—he tries to make a suicide. It is genial.” He frowned
solemnly, as if daring me to contradict him. “This I find clearly genial.”
I laughed and blushed. Bergmann watched me, smiling, like a proud parent
who listens to his son being praised by the headmaster. Then he patted me on
the shoulder.
“Look, if you do not believe me. I will show you. This I wrote this morning,
after reading your book.” He began to fumble in his pockets. As there were only
Christopher Isherwood
*83
seven of them, it didn’t take him long. He pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper.
“My first poem in English. To an English poet.”
I took it and read:
When I am a boy, my mother tells to me
It is lucky to wake up when the morning is bright
And first of all hear a lark sing.
Now I am not longer a boy, and I wake. The morning is dark.
I hear a bird singing with unknown name
In a strange country language, but it is luck, I think.
Who is he, this singer, who does not fear the gray city?
Will they drown him soon, the poor Shelley?
Will Byron's hangmen teach him how one limps?
I hope they will not, because he makes me happy.
“Why,” I said, “it’s beautiful!”
“You like it?” Bergmann was so delighted that he began rubbing his hands.
“But you must correct the English, please.”
“Certainly not. I like it the way it is.”
“Already I think I have a feeling for the language,” said Bergmann, with mod¬
est satisfaction. “I shall write many English poems.”
“May I keep this one?”
“Really? “You want it?” he beamed. “Then I shall inscribe it for you.”
He took out his fountain pen and wrote: “For Christopher, from Friedrich,
his fellow prisoner.”
I laid the poem carefully on the mantelpiece. It seemed to be the only safe
place in the room. “Is this your wife?” I asked, looking at the photographs.
“Yes. And that is Inge, my daughter. You like her?”
“She has beautiful eyes.”
“She is a pianist. Very talented.”
“Are they in Vienna?”
“Unfortunately. Yes. I am most anxious for them. Austria is no longer safe.
The plague is spreading. I wished them to come with me, but my wife has to
look after her mother. It’s not so easy.” Bergmann sighed deeply. Then, with a
sharp glance at me, “You are not married.” It sounded like an accusation.
“How did you know?”
“I know these things. . . .You live with your parents?”
“With my mother and brother. My father’s dead.”
Bergmann grunted and nodded. He was like a doctor who finds his most pes-
J84 Writers
simistic diagnosis is confirmed. “You are a typical mother’s son. It is the Eng¬
lish tragedy.”
I laughed. “Quite a lot of Englishmen do get married, you know.”
“They marry their mothers. It is a disaster. It will lead to the destruction of
Europe.”
“I must say, I don’t quite see . . .”
“It will lead definitely to the destruction of Europe. I have written the first
chapters of a novel about this. It is called The Diary of an Etonian Oedipus.”
Bergmann suddenly gave me a charming smile. “But do not worry. We shall
change all that.”
“All right,” I grinned. “I won’t worry.”
Bergmann lit a cigarette, and blew a cloud of smoke into which he almost
disappeared.
“And now,” he announced, “the horrible but unavoidable moment has come
when we have to talk about this crime we are about to commit: this public out¬
rage, this enormous nuisance, this scandal, this blasphemy. . . .You have read
the original script?”
“They sent a messenger round with it, last night.”
“And . . . ?” Bergmann watched me keenly, waiting for my answer.
“It’s even worse than I expected.”
“Marvelous! Excellent! You see, I am such a horrible old sinner that nothing
is ever as bad as I expect. But you are surprised. You are shocked. That is be¬
cause you are innocent. It is this innocence which I need absolutely to help me,
the innocence of Alyosha Karamazov. I shall proceed to corrupt you. I shall teach
you everything from the very beginning. . . . Do you know what the film is?”
Bergmann cupped his hands, lovingly, as if around an exquisite flower. “The film
is an infernal machine. Once it is ignited and set in motion, it revolves with an
enormous dynamism. It cannot pause. It cannot apologize. It cannot retract any¬
thing. It cannot wait for you to understand it. It cannot explain itself. It simply
ripens to its inevitable explosion. This explosion we have to prepare, like anar¬
chists, with the utmost ingenuity and malice. . . . While you were in Germany
did you ever see Frau Nussbaum’s letzter Tag?”
“Indeed I did. Three or four times.”
Bergmann beamed. “I directed it.”
“No? Really?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I’m afraid I never read the credits. . . . Why, that was one of the best Ger¬
man pictures!”
Bergmann nodded, delighted, accepting this as a matter of course. “You must
tell that to Umbrella.”
“Umbrella?”
Christopher Isherwood
5 8 5
“The Beau Brummel who appeared to us yesterday at lunch.”
“Oh, Ashmeade ...”
Bergmann looked concerned. “He is a great friend of yours?”
“No,” I grinned. “Not exactly.”
“You see, this umbrella of his I find extremely symbolic. It is the British re¬
spectability which thinks: ‘I have my traditions, and they will protect me. Noth¬
ing unpleasant, nothing ungentlemanly can possibly happen within my private
park.’ This respectable umbrella is the Englishman’s magic wand, with which
he will try to wave Hitler out of existence. When Hitler declines rudely to dis¬
appear, the Englishman will open his umbrella and say, ‘After all, what do I care
for a little rain?’ But the rain will be a rain of bombs and blood. The umbrella
is not bomb-proof.”
“Don’t underrate the umbrella,” I said. “It has often been used successfully,
by governesses against bulls. It has a very sharp point.”
“You are wrong. The umbrella is useless. . . . Do you know Goethe?”
“Only a little.”
“Wait. I shall read you something. Wait. Wait.”
“The whole beauty of the film,” I announced to my mother and Richard next
morning at breakfast, “is that it has a certain fixed speed. The way you see it is
mechanically conditioned. I mean, take a painting—you can just glance at it, or
you can stare at the left-hand top comer for half an hour. Same thing with a book.
The author can’t stop you from skimming it, or starting at the last chapter and
reading backwards. The point is, you choose your approach. When you go into
a cinema, it’s different. There’s the film, and you have to look at it as the di¬
rector wants you to look at it. He makes his points, one after another, and he
allows you a certain number of seconds or minutes to grasp each one. If you miss
anything, he won’t repeat himself, and he won’t stop to explain. He can’t. He’s
started something, andhehastogo through with it.. . .Yousee, the film i s re¬
ally like a sort of infernal machine . . .”
I stopped abruptly, with my hands in the air. I had caught myself in the mid¬
dle of one of Bergmann’s most characteristic gestures.
I had always had a pretty good opinion of myself as a writer. But, during those
first days with Bergmann, it was lowered considerably. I had flattered myself
that I had imagination, that I could invent dialogue, that I could develop a char¬
acter. I had believed that I could describe almost anything, just as a competent
artist can draw you an old man’s face, or a table, or a tree.
Well, it seemed that I was wrong.
j 8 6 Writers
The period is early twentieth century, some time before the 1914 war. It is
a warm spring evening in the Vienna Prater. The dancehalls are lighted up. The
coffee houses are full. The bands blare. Fireworks are bursting above the trees.
The swings are swinging. The roundabouts are revolving. There are freak shows,
gypsies telling fortunes, boys playing the concertina. Crowds of people are eat¬
ing, drinking beer, wandering along the paths beside the river. The drunks sing
noisily. The lovers, arm in arm, stroll whispering in the shadow of the elms and
the silver poplars.
There is a girl named Toni, who sells violets. Everybody knows her, and she
has a word for everybody. She laughs and jokes as she offers the flowers. An of¬
ficer tries to kiss her; she slips away from him goodhumoredly. An old lady has
lost her dog; she is sympathetic. An indignant, tyrannical gentleman is looking
for his daughter; Toni knows where she is, and with whom, but she won’t tell.
Then, as she wanders down the alleys carrying her basket, light-hearted and
fancy-free, she comes face to face with a handsome boy in the dress of a student.
He tells her, truthfully, that his name is Rudolf. But he is not what he seems.
He is really the Crown Prince of Borodania.
All this I was to describe. “Do not concern yourself with the shots,” Bergmann
had told me. “Just write dialogue. Create atmosphere. Give the camera some¬
thing to listen to and look at.”
I couldn’t. I couldn’t. My impotence nearly reduced me to tears. It was all
so simple, surely? There is Toni’s father, for instance. He is fat and jolly, and
he has a stall where he sells Wiener Wuerstchen. He talks to his customers. He talks
to Toni. Toni talks to the customers. They reply. It is all very gay, amusing, de¬
lightful. But what the hell do they actually say?
1 didn’t know. I couldn’t write it. That was the brutal truth—I couldn’t draw
a table. I tried to take refuge in my pride. After all, this was movie work, hack
work. It was something essentially false, cheap, vulgar. It was beneath me. I
ought never to have become involved in it, under the influence of Bergmann’s
dangerous charm, and for the sake of the almost incredible twenty pounds a week
which Imperial Bulldog was prepared, quite as a matter of course, to pay me. I
was betraying my art. No wonder it was so difficult.
Nonsense. I didn’treally believe that, either. It isn’t vulgar to be able to make
people talk. An old man selling sausages isn’t vulgar, except in the original mean¬
ing of the word, “belonging to the common people.” Shakespeare would have
known how he spoke. Tolstoy would have known. I didn’t know because, for
all my parlor socialism, I was a snob. I didn’t know how anybody spoke, except
public-school boys and neurotic bohemians.
I fell back, in my despair, upon memories of other movies. I tried to be smart,
facetious. I made involved, wordy jokes. I wrote a page of dialogue which led
nowhere and only succeeded in establishing the fact that an anonymous minor
character was having an affair with somebody else’s wife. As for Rudolf, the
Christopher Isherwood
587
incognito Prince, he talked like the lowest common denominator of all the
worst musical comedies I had ever seen. I hardly dared to show my wretched
attempts to Bergmann at all.
He read them through with furrowed brows and a short profound grunt; but
he didn’t seem either dismayed or surprised. “Let me tell you something, Mas¬
ter,” he began, as he dropped my manuscript casually into the wastepaper bas¬
ket, “the film is a symphony. Each movement is written in a certain key. There
is a note which has to be chosen and struck immediately. It is characteristic of
the whole. It commands the attention.”
Sitting very close to me, and pausing only to draw long breaths from his cig¬
arette, he started to describe the opening sequence. It was astounding. Every¬
thing came to life. The trees began to tremble in the evening breeze, the music
was heard, the roundabouts were set in motion. And the people talked.
Bergmann improvised their conversation, partly in German, partly in ridiculous
English; and it was vivid and real. His eyes sparkled, his gestures grew more ex¬
aggerated, he mimicked, he clowned. I began to laugh. Bergmann smiled de¬
lightedly at his own invention. It was all so simple, so effective, so obvious. Why
hadn’t I thought of it myself?
Bergmann gave me a little pat on the shoulder. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“It’s wonderful! I’ll note that down before I forget.”
Immediately, he was very serious. “No, no. It is wrong. All wrong. I only
wanted to give you some idea . . .No, that won’t do. Wait. We must consid¬
er .. .”
Clouds followed the sunshine. Bergmann scowled grimly as he passed into
philosophical analysis. He gave me ten excellent reasons why the whole thing
was impossible. They, too, were obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of them?
Bergmann sighed. “It’s not so easy . . .” He lit another cigarette. “Not so easy,”
he muttered. “Wait. Wait. Let us see . . .”
He rose and paced the carpet, breathing hard, his hands folded severely be¬
hind his back, his face shut against the outside world, implacably, like a prison
door. Then a thought struck him. He stopped, amused by it. He smiled.
“You know what my wife tells me when I have these difficulties? ‘Friedrich,’
she says, ‘Go and write your poems. When I have cooked the dinner, I will in¬
vent this idiotic story for you. After all, prostitution is a woman’s business.’ ”
We started shooting the picture in the final week of January. I give this ap¬
proximate date because it is almost the last I shall be able to remember. What
followed is so confused in my memory, so transposed and foreshortened, that
I can only describe it synthetically. My recollection of it has no sequence. It is
all of a piece.
Within the great barnlike sound-stage, with its high bare padded walls, big
$88
Writers
enough to enclose an airship, there is neither day nor night: only irregular al¬
ternations of activity and silence. Beneath a firmament of girders and catwalks,
out of which the cowled lamps shine coldly down like planets, stands the in¬
consequent, half-dismantled architecture of the sets; archways, sections of
houses, wood and canvas hills, huge photographic backdrops, the frontages of
streets; a kind of Pompeii, but more desolate, more uncanny, because this is,
literally, a half-world, a limbo of mirror-images, a town which has lost its third
dimension. Only the tangle of heavy power cables is solid, and apt to trip you
as you cross the floor. Your footsteps sound unnaturally loud; you find yourself
walking on tiptoe.
In one corner, amidst these ruins, there is life. A single set is brilliantly illu¬
minated. From the distance, it looks like a shrine, and the figures standing
around it might be worshippers. But it is merely the living room of Toni’s
home, complete with period furniture, gaily colored curtains, a canary cage and
a cuckoo clock. The men who are putting the finishing touches to this charm¬
ing, life-size doll’s house go about their work with the same matter-of-fact, un¬
smiling efficiency which any carpenters and electricians might show in building
a garage.
In the middle of the set, patient and anonymous as tailor’s dummies, are the
actor and actress who are standing in for Arthur Cromwell and Anita Hayden.
Mr. Watts, a thin bald man with gold-rimmed spectacles, walks restlessly back
and forth, regarding them from various angles. A blue-glass monocle hangs
from a ribbon around his neck. He raises it repeatedly to observe the general
effect of the lighting; and the gesture is incongruously like that of a Regency fop.
Beside him is Fred Murray, red-haired and wearing rubber shoes. Fred is what
is called “the Gaffer,” in studio slang. According to our etiquette, Mr. Watts can¬
not condescend to give orders directly. He murmurs them to Fred; and Fred,
as if translating into a foreign language, shouts up to the men who workthe lamps
on the catwalk, high above.
“Put a silk on that rifle. . . . Take a couple of turns on number four. . . .Kill
that baby.”
“I’m ready,” says Mr. Watts, at length.
“All right,” Fred Murray shouts to his assistants. “Save them.” The arcs are
switched off and the house lights go on. The set loses its shrinelike glamour. The
stand-ins leave their positions. There is an atmosphere of anti-climax, as though
we were about to start all over again from the beginning.
“Now then, are we nearly ready?” This is Eliot, the assistant-director. He has
a long pointed nose and a public-school accent. He carries a copy of the script,
like an emblem of office, in his hand. His manner is bossy, but self-conscious
and unsure. I feel sorry for him. His job makes him unpopular. He has to fuss
and keep things moving; and he doesn’t know how to do it without being ag-
Christopher Isherwood 589
gressive. He doesn’t know how to talk to the older men, or the stagehands. He
is conscious of his own high-pitched, cultured voice. His shirt collar has too much
starch in it.
“What’s the hold-up?” Eliot plaintively addresses the world in general. “What
about you, Roger?”
Roger, the sound-recordist, curses under his breath. He hates being rushed.
“There’s a baffle on this mike,” he explains, with acid patience. “It’s a bloody
lively set. . . . Shift your boom a bit more round to the left, Teddy. We’ll have
to use a flower pot.”
The boom moves over, dangling the microphone, like a fishing rod. Teddy,
who works it, crosses the set and conceals a second microphone behind a china
figure on the table.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, I hear Arthur Cromwell calling,
“Where’s the invaluable Isherwood?” Arthur plays Toni’s father. He is a big hand¬
some man who used to be a matinee idol—a real fine old ham. He wants me to
hear him his part. When he forgets a line, he snaps his fingers, without impa¬
tience.
“What’s the matter, Toni? Isn’t it time to go to the Prater?”
“Aren’t you going to the Prater today?” I prompt.
“Aren’t you going to the Prater today?” But Arthur has some mysterious
actor’s inhibition about this. “Bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? I can’t hear myself say¬
ing that, somehow. . . . How about ‘Why aren’t you at the Prater?’ ”
“All right.”
Bergmann calls, “Isherwood!” (Since we have been working in the studio, he
always addresses me by my surname in public.) He marches away from the set
with his hands behind his back, not even glancing around to see if I am follow¬
ing. We go through the double doors and out onto the fire-escape. Everybody
retires to the fire-escape when they want to talk and smoke, because smoking
isn’t allowed inside the building. I nod to the doorman, who is reading the Daily
Herald through his pince-nez. He is a great admirer of Soviet Russia.
Standing on the little iron platform, we can see a glimpse of the chilly gray
river beyond the rooftops. The air smells damp and fresh, after being indoors,
and there is a breeze which ruffles Bergmann’s bushy hair.
“How is the scene? Is it all right like this?”
“Yes, I think so.” I try to sound convincing. I feel lazy, this morning, and don’t
want any trouble. W e both examine our copies of the script; or, at least, I pre¬
tend to. I have read it so often that the words have lost their meaning.
Bergmann frowns and grunts. “I thought, maybe, if we could find something.
It seems so bare, so poor. . . . Couldn’t perhaps Tony say, ‘I cannot sell the vi¬
olets of yesterday; they are unfresh?’ ”
“ T can’t sell yesterday’s violets; they wither so quickly.’ ”
J9°
Writers
“Good. Good . . . Write that down.”
I write it into the script. Eliot appears at the door. “Ready to rehearse now,
• »
sir.
“Let us go.” Bergmann leads the way back to the set, with Eliot and myself
following—a general attended by his staff. Everybody watches us, wondering
if anything important has been decided. There is a childish satisfaction in having
kept so many people waiting.
Eliot goes over to the door of Anita Hayden’s portable dressing room. “Miss
Hayden,” he says, very self-consciously, “would you come now, please? We’re
ready.”
Anita, looking like a petulant little girl in her short flowered dress, apron and
frilly petticoats, emerges and walks onto the set. Like nearly all famous people,
she seems a size smaller than her photographs.
I approach her, afraid that this is going to be unpleasant. I try to grin. “Sorry!
We’ve changed a line again.”
But Anita, for some reason, is in a good mood.
“Brute!” she exclaims, coquettishly. “Well, come on, let’s hear the worst.”
Eliot blows his whistle. “Quiet there! Dead quiet! Full rehearsal! Green
light!” This last order is for the doorman, who will switch on the sign over the
sound-stage door: “Rehearsal. Enter quietly.”
At last we are ready. The rehearsal begins.
Toni is standing alone, looking pensively out of the window. It is the day after
her meeting with Rudolf. And now she has just received a letter of love and
farewell, cryptically worded, because he cannot tell her the whole truth: that
he is the Prince and that he has been summoned to Borodania. So Toni is heart¬
broken and bewildered. Her eyes are full of tears. (This part of the scene is cov¬
ered by a close-up.)
The door opens. Toni’s father comes in.
Father: “What’s the matter, Toni? Why aren’t you at the Prater?”
Toni (inventing an excuse): “I—I haven’t any flowers.”
Father: “Did you sell all you had yesterday?”
Toni (with a faraway look in her eyes, which shows that her answer is sym¬
bolic): “I can’t sell yesterday’s violets. They wither so quickly.”
She begins to sob, and runs out of the room, banging the door. Her father
stands looking after her, in blank surprise. Then he shrugs his shoulders and gri¬
maces, as much as to say that woman’s whims are beyond his understanding.
“Cut.” Bergmann rises quickly from his chair and goes over to Anita. “Let me
tell you something, Madame. The way you throw open that door is great. It is
altogether much too great. You give to the movement a theatrical importance
beside which the slaughter of Rasputin is just a quick breakfast.”
Anita smiles graciously. “Sorry, Friedrich. I felt it wasn’t right.” She is in a
good mood.
S 9
Christopher Isherwood
“Let me show you, once ...” Bergmann stands by the table. His lips trem¬
ble, his eyes glisten; he is a beautiful young girl on the verge of tears. “I cannot
sell violets of yesterday . . .They wither. . .’’He runs, with face averted, from
the room. There is a bump, behind the scenes, and a muttered, "Verf]ucht!”He
must have tripped over one of the cables. An instant later, Bergmann reappears,
grinning, a little out of breath. “You see how I mean? With a certain lightness.
Do not hit it too hard.”
“Yes,” Anita nods seriously, playing up to him. “I think I see.”
“All right, my darling,” Bergmann pats her arm. “We shoot it once.”
“Where’s Timmy?” Anita demands, in a bored, melodious voice. The make¬
up man hurries forward. “Timmy darling, is my face all right?”
She submits it to him, as impersonally as one extends a shoe to the bootblack;
this anxiously pretty mask which is her job, her source of income, the tool of
her trade. Timmy dabs at it expertly. She glances at herself coldly, without van¬
ity, in his pocket mirror. The camera operator’s assistant measures the distance
from the lens to her nose, with a tape.
A boy named George asks the continuity girl for the number of the scene. It
has to be chalked on the board which he will hold in front of the camera, before
the take.
Roger calls from the sound booth, “Come in for this one, Chris. I need an
alibi.” He often says this, jokingly, but with a certain veiled resentment, which
is directed chiefly against Eliot. Roger resents any criticism of the sound record¬
ing. He is very conscientious about his job.
I go into the sound booth, which is like a telephone box. Eliot begins to shout
bossily, “Right! Ready, sir? Ready, Mr. Watts? Bell, please. Doors! Red light!”
Then, because some people are still moving about, “Quiet! This is a take!”
Roger picks up the headphones and plugs in to the sound-camera room,
which is in a gallery, overlooking the floor. “Ready to go, Jack?” he asks. Two
buzzes: the okay signal.
“Are we all set?” asks Eliot. Then, after a moment, “Turn them over.”
“Running,” the boy at the switchboard tells him.
George steps forward and holds the board up before the camera.
Roger buzzes twice to the sound camera. Two buzzes in reply. Roger buzzes
twice to signal Bergmann that Sound is ready.
Clark, the boy who works the clappers, says in a loud voice, “104, take one.”
He claps the clappers.
Bergmann, sitting grim in his chair, hisses between shut teeth, “Camera!”
I watch him, throughout the take. It isn’t necessary to look at the set; the
whole scene is reflected in his face. He never shifts his eyes from the actors for
an instant. He seems to control every gesture, every intonation, by a sheer ef¬
fort of hypnotic power. His lips move, his face relaxes and contracts, his body
is thrust forward or drawn back in its seat, his hands rise and fall to mark the
59 *
Writers
phases of the action. Now he is coaxing Toni from the window, now warning
against too much haste, now encouraging her father, now calling for more ex¬
pression, now afraid the pause will be missed, now delighted with the tempo,
now anxious again, now really alarmed, now reassured, now touched, now
pleased, now very pleased, now cautious, now disturbed, now amused.
Bergmann’s concentration is marvelous in its singleness of purpose. It is the act
of creation.
When it is all over, he sighs, as if awaking from sleep. Softly, lovingly, he
breaths the word, “Cut.”
He turns to the camera operator. “How was it?”
“All right, sir, but I’d like to go again.”
Roger gives two buzzes.
“Okay for sound, sir,” says Teddy.
Joyce, the continuity girl, checks the footage with the operator. Roger puts
his head out of the booth. “Teddy, will you favor round toward Miss Hayden a
bit? I’m afraid of that bloody camera.”
This problem of camera noise is perpetual. To guard against it, the camera
is muffled in a quilt, which makes it look like a pet poodle wearing its winter
jacket. Nevertheless, the noise persists. Bergmann never fails to react to it. Some¬
times he curses, sometimes he sulks. This morning, however, he is in a clown¬
ing mood. He goes over to the camera and throws his arms around it.
“My dear old friend, we make you work so hard! It’s too cruel! Mr.
Chatsworth should give you a pension, and send you to the meadow to eat grass
with the retired racehorses.”
Everybody laughs. Bergmann is quite popular on the floor. “He’s what I call
a regular comedian,” the doorman tells me. “This picture will be good, if it’s
half as funny as he is.”
Mr. Watts and the camera operator are discussing how to avoid the mike
shadow. Bergmann calls it “the Original Sin of the Talking Pictures.” On rare
occasions, the microphone itself somehow manages to get into the shot, with¬
out anybody noticing it. There is something sinister about it, like Poe’s Raven.
It is always there, silently listening.
A long buzz from the sound-camera room. Roger puts on the headphones and
reports, “Sound-camera reloading, sir.” Bergmann gives a grunt and goes off into
a comer to dictate a poem to Dorothy. Amidst all this turmoil, he still finds time
to compose one, nearly every day. Fred Murray is shouting directions for the
readjustment of various lamps on the spot-rail and gantry; the tweets, the snooks
and the baby spots. Joyce is typing the continuity report, which contains the exact
text of each scene, as acted, with details of footage, screen-time, hours of work
and so forth.
“Come on,” shouts Eliot. “Aren’t we ready, yet?”
Christopher Isherwood
S 93
Roger calls up to the camera room, “Going again, Jack.”
Teddy notices that Eliot is inadvertently standing in front of Roger’s window,
blocking our view of the set. He grins maliciously, and says, in an obvious par¬
ody of Eliot’s most officious tone, “Clear the booth, please!” Eliot blushes and
moves aside, murmuring, “Sorry.” Roger winks at me. Teddy, very pleased with
himself, swings the microphone-boom, over whistling, and warning his crew,
“Mind your heads, my braves!”
Roger generally lets me ring the bell for silence and make the two-buzz sig¬
nal. It is one of the few opportunities I get of earning my salary. But, this time,
I am mooning. I watch Bergmann telling something funny to Fred Murray, and
wonder what it is. Roger has to make the signals himself. “I’m sorry to see a
falling off in your wonted efficiency, Chris,” he tells me. And he adds, to
Teddy, “I was thinking of giving Chris his ticket, but now I shall have to re¬
consider it.”
Roger’s nautical expressions date back to the time when he was a radio op¬
erator on a merchant ship. He still has something of the ship’s officer about him,
in his brisk movements, his conscientiousness, his alert, pink, open-air face. He
studies yachting magazines in the booth, between takes.
“Quiet! Get settled down. Ready? Turn them over.”
“Running.”
“104, take two.”
“Camera ...”
“Cut.”
“Okay, sir.”
“Okay for sound, Mr. Bergmann.”
“All right. We print this one.”
“Are you going again, sir?”
“We shoot it once more, quickly.”
“Right. Come on, now. Let’s get this in the can.”
But the third take is N.G. Anita fluffs a line. In the middle of the fourth take,
the camera jams. The fifth take is all right, and will be printed. My long, idle,
tiring morning is over, and it is time for lunch.
5 94
Writers
Raymond Chandler.
Moviegoers often refer to characters by the name of the actors who play them: "John Wayne
walks into the saloon and starts shooting." What is amusing in the letter from Raymond
Chandler (1888—1959) to his publisher, Hamish Hamilton, is that even though he cre¬
ated the character of Philip Marlowe, he sometimes refers to the character as Bogart. The
plot of The Big Sleep became legendary for its confusion, and there is a story that William
Faulkner, who worked on the screenplay, called Chandlerfor guidance on a puzzling de¬
tail, and Chandler was unable to explain it either. Reading this letter makes it clear that
the movie was assembled out of elements of the various screenplay drafts and the original
novel by Howard Hawks, in response to a series of studio demands and that thefilm, won-
deful as it is, was never entirely thought through.
from Selected Letters
To Hamish Hamilton
Dear Jamie:
May 30th, 1946
When and if you see The Big Sleep (the first half of it anyhow), you will re¬
alize what can be done with this sort of story by a director with the gift of
atmosphere and the requisite touch of hidden sadism. Bogart, of course,
is also so much better than any other tough-guy actor that he makes bums
of the Ladds and the Powells. As we say here, Bogart can be tough with¬
out a gun. Also he has a sense of humor that contains that grating under¬
tone of contempt. Ladd is hard, bitter and occasionally charming, but he
is after all a small boy’s idea of a tough guy. Bogart is the genuine article.
Raymond Chandler
595
Like Edward G. Robinson when he was younger all he has to do to dom¬
inate a scene is to enter it. The Big Sleep has had an unfortunate history.
The girl who played the nymphy sister' was so good she shattered Miss Ba¬
call completely. So they cut the picture in such a way that all her best scenes
were left out except one. The result made nonsense and Howard Hawks
threatened to sue to restrain Warners from releasing the picture. After
long argument, as I hear it, he went back and did a lot of re-shooting. I
have not seen the result of this. The picture has not even been trade-shown.
But if Hawks got his way, the picture will be the best of its kind. Since I
had nothing to do with it, I say this with some faint regret. Well, that’s
not exactly true because Hawks time after time got dissatisfied with his
script and would go back to the book and shoot scenes straight out of it.
There was also a wonderful scene he and I planned together in talk. At the
end of the picture Bogart and Carmen were caught in Geiger’s house by
the Eddie Mars and his lifetakers. That is Bogart (Marlowe) was trapped
there and the girl came along and they let her go in. Bogart knew she was
a murderess and he also knew that the first person out of that door would
walk into a hail of machine gun bullets. The girl didn’t know this. Mar¬
lowe also knew that if he sent the girl out to be killed, the gang would take
it on the lam, thus saving his own life for the time being. He didn’t feel
like playing God or saving his skin by letting Carmen leave. Neither did
he feel like playing Sir Philip Sidney to save a worthless life. So he put it
up to God by tossing a coin. Before he tossed the coin he prayed out loud,
in a sort of way. The gist of his prayer was that he, Marlowe, had done the
best he knew how and through no fault of his own was put in a position
of making a decision God had no right to force him to make. He wanted
that decision made by the authority who allowed all this mess to happen.
If the coin came down heads, he would let the girl go. He tossed and it
came down heads. The girl thought this was some kind of a game to hold
her there for the police. She started to leave. At the last moment, as she
had her hand on the doorknob, Marlowe weakened and started for her to
stop her. She laughed in his face and pulled a gun on him. Then she opened
the door an inch or two and you could see she was going to shoot and was
thoroughly delighted with the situation. At that moment a burst of ma¬
chine gun fire walked across the panel of the door and tore her to pieces.
The gunmen outside had heard a siren in the distance and panicked and
thrown a casual burst through the door just for a visiting card—without
expecting to hit anyone. I don’t know what happened to this scene. Per¬
haps the boys wouldn’t write it or couldn’t. Perhaps Mr. Bogart wouldn’t
'Martha Vickers.
J96 Writers
play it. You never know in Hollywood. All I know i s i t would have been
a hair-raising thing if well done. I think I’ll try it myself sometime.
All the best,
Ray
To Ray Stark
October 1948
Dear Ray:
The point about Marlowe to remember is that he is a first person charac¬
ter, whether he shows up that way in a radio script or not. A first person
character is under the disadvantage that he must be a better man to the
reader than he is to himself. Too many first person characters give an of¬
fensively cocky impression. That’s bad. To avoid that you must not always
give him the punch line or the exit line. Not even often. Let the other char¬
acters have the toppers. Leave him without a gag. Insofar as it is possible.
Howard Hawks, a very wise hombre, remarked to me when he was doing
The Big Sleep that he thought one of Marlowe’s most effective tricks was
just giving the other man the trick and not saying anything at all. That puts
the other man on the spot. A devastating crack loses a lot of its force when
it doesn’t provoke any answer, when the other man just rides with the
punch. Then you either have to top it yourself or give ground.
Don’t have Marlowe say things merely to score off the other charac¬
ters. When he comes out with a smash wisecrack it should be jerked out
of him emotionally, so that he is discharging an emotion and not even think¬
ing about laying anyone out with a sharp retort. If you use similes, try and
make them both extravagant and original. And there is a question of how
the retort discourteous is delivered. The sharper the wisecrack, the less
forcible should be the way it is said. There should not be any eff ect of gloat¬
ing. All this is a question of taste. If you haven’t got it, you can’t get it by
rules. There are a lot of clever people in Hollywood who overreach them¬
selves because they don’tknow where to stop. It’sbad enough in pictures;
but on the radio it is worse, because the voice is everything and you can’t
have an expression on the face that offsets the words. You can’t really
throw away a line as if it was something that tasted bad when you said it.
Oh well, I’m not so smart either.
Y ours,
Ray
Charles B u k o w s k i
S 97
Charles Bukowski
1 spent a long day and night on the set of Barfly, the Barbet Schroeder movie that was
written by Charles Bukowski (1920—1995). Hollywood is Bukowski's novel based on
that production, and on the basis of how he tran formed what I witnessed into fiction, his
strategy was to keep everything that was entertaining and add dialogue. The movie is a
very thinly disguised roman a clef; in this selection Francine Bowers represents Faye Dun¬
away, Jon Pinchot is Schroeder, and Jack Bledsoe is Mickey Rourke. Henry Chinaski of
course is always Bukowski.
from Hollywood
I said to one of the men as we walked along, “God damn it, we left our wine
bottle in the car! We are going to need a couple of bottles of wine for the movie!”
“I’ll get them for you, Mr. Chinaski,” the man said. I had no idea who he was.
He broke away from the group.
“And don’t forget a corkscrew!” I yelled after him.
We moved further into the mall. Far over to our left I could see flashbulbs
popping. Then I saw Francine Bowers. She was posing, looking first this way,
then that. She was regal. The best of the last.
We followed the men. Then there was a tv camera. More flashbulbs. I rec¬
ognized the lady as one of the interviewers on an entertainment station.
“Henry Chinaski,” she greeted me.
“How do you do,” I bowed.
Then before she could ask any questions, I said, “We are worried. We left
our wine in the limo. The chauffeur is probably drinking it right now. We need
more wine.”
“As the screenwriter, do you like the way the movie turned out?”
S 98
Wt it ers
“The director handled two difficult actors, the leads, without any problem
at all. We used real barflies, none of whom are able to make it out here tonight.
The camera work is great and the screenplay is well written.”
“Is this the story of your life?”
“A few days out of a ten year period ...”
“Thank you, Mr. Chinaski, for speaking to us . . .”
“Sure ...”
Then John Pinchot was there. “Hello, Sarah, hello, Hank . . . Follow
n
me . . .
There was a small group with cassette recorders. Some flashbulbs went off.
I didn’t know who they were. They began asking questions.
“Do you think drinking should be glorified?”
“No more than anything else . . .”
“Isn’t drinking a disease?”
“Breathing is a disease.”
“Don’t you find drunks obnoxious?”
“Yes, most of them are. So are most teetotalers.”
“But who would be interested in the life of a drunk?”
“Another drunk.”
“Do you consider heavy drinking to be socially acceptable?”
“In Beverly Hills, yes. On skid row, no.”
“Have you ‘gone Hollywood’?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why did you write this movie?”
“When I write something I never think about why.”
“Who is your favorite male actor?”
“Don’t have any.”
“Female.”
“Same answer.”
Jon Pinchot tugged at my sleeve.
“We’d better go. I think the movie is about to begin . . .”
Sarah and I followed him. We were rushed along. Then we were at the the¬
atre. Everybody seemed to be inside.
Then there was the voice behind us: “WAIT!”
It was the man who had gone for the wine. He had a large paper bag. He ran
up and thrust it into my arms.
“You are one of the world’s great men!” I told him.
He just turned and ran off.
“Who was that?” I asked Jon. “Does he work for Firepower?”
“I don’t know. . .”
“Come on,” said Sarah, “we better go in.”
Charles B u kow ski
599
We followed Jon into the lobby. The doors were already closed. Jon pushed
them open. It was dark and we followed him down the aisle. The movie had al¬
ready begun.
“Shit,” I said, “couldn’t they have waited for us? We are the writers!”
“Follow me,” said Jon, “I saved you two seats.”
We followed him all the way down to the first row, side aisle. There were
two seats up against the wall.
“I’ll see you later,” said Jon.
There were two girls seated in our same aisle. One of them said to the other,
“1 don’t know what we are doing here. I really hate Henry Chinaski. He’s a dis¬
gusting human being!”
I fumbled in the dark for one of .the wine bottles and an opener. The screen
went from dark to light.
“Henry Chinaski,” the girl went on, “hates women, he hates children, he’s a
creepy bitter old fuck, I don’t see what people see in him!”
The other girl saw mein the light of the screen and dug her friend in the ribs
with her elbow.
“Shhhh ... I think that’s him!”
I opened one bottle for Sarah and one for me. We each lifted them high. Then
Sarah said, “I ought to beat up those cunts!”
“Don’t,” I said, “my enemies are the source ofhalfmy income. They hate me
so much that it becomes a subliminal love affair.”
We were in a terrible position to view the movie. From where we sat, all
the bodies were tall, elongated and thin, and the heads were the worst. Large
and misshapen, big foreheads, and yet as big as the foreheads were there seemed
to be almost no eyes or mouths or chins to the heads. Also the sound was too
loud and badly distorted. The dialog sounded like, “whooo, woooo, wuld
WAFTTA KRISTOL, YO TO YO . . .”
The premiere of my first and only movie and I couldn’t make anything out
of it.
I was later to find out that there was another theatre right next door show¬
ing our movie at exactly the same time and that it was only half-full.
“Jon didn’t plan this very well,” Sarah suggested.
“Well, we’ll see it on video cassette some day,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she said.
And we lifted our bottles in unison.
The girls watched us in total fascination and disgust.
The oversized heads with big foreheads kept moving around on the screen.
And the heads spoke loudly to each other.
“Flam flam wool wo, taka brak vo so . . .”
“Ya DOL YA, TEK TA TAM, YA VO DO . . .”
6 oo
Wr iters
“Preebers . .
“Braka dam . .
“They fucked over my dialogue, Sarah.”
“Uh. . . yeah . .
But it was best when the big tall foreheads went for the very tall thin drinks,
the drink filled half the screen, and then the drink went somewhere in, under
the forehead, and then it was gone, and then there were just undulating empty
glasses, changing shape, stretching and contracting, glistening empty glasses
from hades. What hangovers those foreheads would have.
Finally, Sarah and I stopped watching the screen and just worked on our wine
bottles.
And, with time, the movie ended.
There was some applause and then we waited for the audience to file out.
We waited for a good while. Then we got up and went out.
There were more flashbulbs in the lobby. Handshakes. We ducked that.
We needed the restrooms.
“See you by the potted plant across from the ladies room,” I told Sarah.
I made it to the men’s room. In the urinal next to me was a swaying drunk.
He looked over.
“Hey, you’re Henry Chinaski, aren’t ya?”
“No, I’m his brother, Donny.”
The drunk swayed some more, pissing away.
“Chinaski never wrote about no brother.”
“He hates me, that’s why.”
“How come?”
“Because I’ve kicked his ass about 60 or 70 times.”
The drunk didn’t know what to think about that. He just kept pissing and
swaying. I went over, washed up, got out of there.
I waited by the potted plant. The chauffeur stepped out from behind it.
“I’ve been instructed to take you to the celebration party.”
“Great,” I said, “as soon as Sarah . . .”
And there was Sarah. “You know, baby, most chauffeurs wait outside but our
man, Frank, he came inside and found us. But he took off his cap so as not to
look like a chauffeur.”
“It’s been a strange night,” she said.
We followed Frank through the mall. He was about two steps ahead.
“You didn’t drink our wine, did you, Frank?”
“No, sir ...”
“Frank, isn’t the first rule for a chauffeur never to leave his limo? Suppose
somebody stole the limo, for instance?”
“Sir, nobody would ever steal that piece of crap.”
Charles B u k o w s k i
60
“You’re right.”
As soon as we stepped outside of the mall, Frank put his cap back on. The
limo was parked right at the curb.
He helped us into the back seat and we were off.
The post-premiere party was at Copperfield’s on La Brea Avenue. Frank pulled
up in front, let us out and we moved toward the entrance to more flashbulbs. 1
got the idea that they didn’t know who they were photographing. As long as
you got out of a limo you qualified.
We were recognized at the entrance and were let inside to a crowd of peo¬
ple, closely packed in and all holding glasses of red wine in their hands. They
stood in groups of 3 or 4 or more, talking or not talking. There was no air con¬
ditioning and although it was cool outside, it was hot in there, very hot. There
were just too many people sucking in the oxygen.
Sarah and I got our wine and stood there, trying to get it down. The wine
was very abrasive. There is nothing worse than cheap red wine unless it’s cheap
white wine that has been allowed to get warm.
“Who are all these people, Sarah? What do they want here?”
“Some are in the business, some are on the edge of the business and some are
just here because they can’t think of anyplace else to be.”
“What are they doing?”
“Some are trying to make contacts, others are trying to stay in contact. Some
go to every function like this that they are able to. Also there’s a smattering of
the press.”
The feeling in the air was not good. It was joyless. These were the survivors,
the scramblers, the sharks, the cheapies. The lost souls chatted away and it was
hot, hot, hot.
Then a man in an expensive suit came up. “Aren’t you Mr. and Mrs. Chi-
naski?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You don’t belong down here. You belong upstairs. Follow me.”
We followed him.
We followed him up a stairway and to the second floor. It was not quite as
crowded. The man in the expensive suit turned and faced us.
“You mustn’t drink the wine they are serving here. I will get you your own
bottle.”
“Thanks. Make it two.”
“Of course. I’ll be right back . . .”
“Hank, what does all this mean?”
“Accept it. It will never happen again.”
6o2
tVr iters
I looked at the crowd. I got the same feeling from them as I got from the crowd
downstairs.
“I wonder who that guy is?” I asked.
Then he was back with two bottles of good wine and a corkscrew, plus fresh
wine glasses. ■
“Thank you much,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” he said. “I used to read your column in the L.A. Free Press.”
“You don’t look that old.”
“I’m not. My dad was a hippie. I read the paper after he was done with it.”
“Can I ask your name?”
“Carl Wilson. I own this place.”
“Oh, I see. Well, thank you again for the good wine.”
“You’re welcome. Let me know if you need more.”
“Sure.”
Then he was gone. I opened a bottle and poured two glasses. We gave it a
try. Really good wine.
“Now,” I asked Sarah, “who are these people up here? How are they differ¬
ent than the ones downstairs?”
“They are the same. They just have more pull, better luck. Money, politics,
family. Those in the industry bring in their family and friends. Ability and tal¬
ent are secondary. I know I sound like I’m on a soapbox but that’s the way it
is.”
“It adds up. Even the so-called best movies seem very bad to me.”
“You’d rather watch a horse race.”
“Of course ...”
Then Jon Pinchot walked up.
“My god! These people! I feel like I’ve been covered with shit!” I laughed.
Then Francine Bowers came over. She was elated. She had made her come¬
back.
“You were good, Francine,” I said.
“Yes,” said Jon.
“You let your hair down,” said Sarah.
“Maybe too much?”
“Not at all,” I said.
“Hey,” said Francine, “what’s that wine you’re drinking? It looks like good
stuff.”
“Have some,” I tilted the bottle into her glass.
“Me too,” said Jon.
“How come you get his good stuff?” Francine asked.
“The owner’s father was a hippie. They both read the L.A. Free Press. I used to
write a column, ‘Notes of a Neanderthal Man.’ ”
Charles B u kow ski
603
Then we all stood there not saying anything. There was nothing more to say.
The movie was finished.
“Where’s Jack Bledsoe?” I asked.
“Oh,” said Jon, “he doesn’t come to these things.”
“Well, 1 do,” said Francine.
“We do too,” Sarah admitted.
Then there was some beckoning from another group.
“A magazine wants to interview you, Francine. Movie Mirror.”
“Of course,” said Francine. “Forgive me,” she said to us.
“Sure.”
She walked over, stately and proud. I felt good for her. I felt good for any¬
body who made a comeback after being relegated to the hinterlands.
“You go over there with her, Jon,” said Sarah. “She’ll feel better . . .”
“Should I go too, Sarah?”
“No, Flank, you’ll only try to hog the interview. And remember, you charge
$ 1,000 now.”
“That’s right ...”
“All right,” said Jon, “I’ll go over there.”
Then he was gone, over there.
A young man walked up with a tape recorder. “I’m from the Herald-Examiner.
I do the ‘Talk and Tell’ column. Flow did you like the way the movie came out?”
“Do you have a thousand dollars?” Sarah asked.
“Sarah, this is just chit-chat, it’s all right.”
“Well, how did you like the way the movie turned out?”
“It’s a better than average movie. Long after this year’s Academy Award
movies are forgotten, The Dance of Jim Beam will be showing up now and then
in the Art houses. And it will pop up on tv from time to time, if the world lasts.”
“You really think so?”
“Yes. And as it’s viewed again and again special meanings will be found in the
lines and scenes that weren’t intended by anyone. Overpraise and underpraise
is the norm in our society.”
“Do barflies talk like that?”
“Some of them do until somebody kills them.”
“You seem to rate this movie pretty high.”
“It’s not that good. It’s only that the others are so bad.”
“What do you consider to be the greatest movie that you have ever
seen?”
“Eraserhead."
“Eraserhead?”
“Yes.”
“And what’s next on your list?”
604
Writers
"Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf"
Then Carl Wilson was back. “Chinaski, there’s a guy downstairs who claims
he knows you. He wants to come up. One John Galt.”
“Let him up here, please.”
“Well, thank you, Chinaski,” said the Herald-Examiner man.
“You’re welcome.”
I uncorked the second bottle and poured us a couple more. Sarah held her
booze remarkably well. She only became talkative when we were alone together.
And then she talked good sense, mostly.
Then, there he was John Galt. Big John Galt. He walked up.
“Hank and I never shake hands,” he smiled. “Hello, Sarah,” he said, “got this
guy under control?”
“Yes, John.”
Damn, I thought, I know so many guys named John.
The biblical names hung on. John, Mark, Peter, Paul.
Big John Galt looked good. His eyes had gotten kinder. Kindness came fi¬
nally to the better ones. There was less self-interest. Less fear. Less competi¬
tive gamesmanship.
“You’re looking good, baby,” I told him.
“You look better now than you did ig years ago,” he said.
“Better booze, John.”
“It’s the vitamins and health foods,” said Sarah. “No red meat, no salt, no
sugar.”
“If this ever gets out my book sales are going to plummet, John.”
“Your stuff will always sell, Hank. A child can read it.”
Big John Galt. God damn, what a life-saver he had been. Working for the
post office, I had gone over to his place instead of eating or sleeping or doing all
the other things. Big John was always there. A lady supported him. The ladies
always supported Big John. “Hank, when I work, I’m not happy. I want to be
happy,” he would say.
There was always this big bowl of speed sitting on the coffeetable between
us. It was usually filled to the brim with pills and capsules. “Have some.”
I would dip in and eat them like candy. “John, this shit is going to destroy
your brain.’’“Each man is different, Hank, what destroys one doesn’t affect an¬
other.”
Marvelous nights of bullshit. I brought my own beer and popped the pills.
John was the best-read man I had ever met, but not pedantic. But he was odd.
Maybe it was the speed.
Sometimes at 3 or 4 a.m. he’d get the urge to raid garbage cans and back¬
yards. I’d go with him. “I want this.” “Shit, John, it’s just an old left boot some¬
body threw away.” “I want it.”
Charles B u k ow ski
6oj
His whole house was filled with trash. Piles of it everywhere. When you
wanted to sit on the couch you’d have to push a mound of trash to one side. And
his walls were pasted over with mottos and odd newspaper headlines. All the
stuff was way off key. Like the last words of the earth’s last maniac. In the cel¬
lar of his house were thousands of books stacked up and they were swollen and
wet and rotted with the damp. He had read them all and come away quite well.
All he needed to survive was a shoestring and you’d better not get in a chess
game with him, or a struggle to the death. He was a marvel. I do suppose in
those days I had a fair amount of self-pity and he made me aware of that. Mainly,
those times and those hours were entertaining. I fed off of Big John Galt when
there was nothing else around. He was a writer too. And later I got lucky with
the word and he didn’t. He could write a very powerful poem but in between
times there were spaces where he just seemed vacant. He explained it to me, “I
don’t want to be famous, I just want to feel good.” He was one of the best read¬
ers of poetry, his or anybody else’s, that I had ever heard. He was a beautiful
man. And later, after my luck, when I’d mention Big John Galt here and there,
I’d get the same feedback, “I don’t see what Chinaski sees in that old blow-hard.”
Those who had accepted me and my work wouldn’t accept him and his work
and I wondered if maybe my writing was made for fools? Which I couldn’t help.
A bird flies, a snake crawls, I change typewriter ribbons.
Anyhow, it felt good seeing John Galt once again. He had a new lady with
him.
“This is Lisa,” he said. “She writes poetry too.”
Lisa jumped right in and began talking. She talked up a storm and John just
stood there. Maybe it was an off night for her but she sounded like an old time
Female Libber. Which is all right, for them, except they tend to eat up the oxy¬
gen and it was already too hot in there for lack of fresh air. She went on and on,
telling us everything. John and she often read together. Did I ever hear of Babs
Danish? “No,” I told her. Well, Babs Danish was black and she was female and
when she read she wore big earrings and she was very passionate and the ear¬
rings jumped up and down and her brother Tip provided a musical backdrop for
her readings. I should hear her.
“Hank doesn’t go to poetry readings,” Sarah said, “but I’ve heard Babs Dan¬
ish and I like her very much.”
“John and I and Babs are reading at Beyond Baroque next Wednesday night,
will you come?”
“I probably will,” said Sarah. And she probably would.
I took a long look at John Galt then. He looked gentle and good but I saw a
deep pain in his eyes that I had never seen before. For a man who had wanted
to be happy he looked like a man who had lost two pawns in the early rounds
of a chess match without gaining an advantage.
6o6
(Writers
Then the Herald-Examiner man was back.
“Mr. Chinaski,” he said, “I wanted to ask you another question.”
I introduced him to John Galt and Lisa.
“John Galt,” I said, “is the great undiscovered poet in America. This man
helped me to go on when all else said stop. I want you to interview John Galt.”
“Well, Mr. Galt?”
“Hank and I knew each other maybe 20 years ago . . .”
Sarah and I drifted off.
“Looks like with Lisa John’s got a full nine innings on his hands,” I said.
“Maybe it’s good for him.”
“Maybe.”
More people had come upstairs. It seemed that nobody had left. What was there?
Contacts? Opportunities? Was it worth it? Wasn’t it better not to be in show
business? No, no. Who wants to be a gardener or a taxi driver? Who wants to
be a tax accountant? Weren’t we all artists? Weren’t our minds better than that?
Better to suffer this way rather than the other. At least it looks better.
Our second bottle was almost empty.
Then Jon Pinchot returned.
“Jack Bledsoe is here. He wants to see you.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s over there, by the doorway.”
And sure enough, there was Jack Bledsoe, just leaning in the doorway with
his famous and sensitive smile.
Sarah and I walked over. I reached out and Jack and I shook hands.
I thought of John Galt’s saying, “Hank and I never shake hands.”
“Good show, Jack, great acting. I’m really glad you were aboard.”
“Did I put it over?”
“I think you did.”
“I didn’t want to get too much of your voice in there or too much of your
slouch . .
“You didn’t.”
“I just wanted to come by to say hello to you.”
That one struck me. I didn’t know how to react.
“Well, hell, baby, we can get drunk together anytime.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Oh, yeah . . .Well, thank you, Jack, glad you came by. How about one for
the road anyhow?”
“No, I’m going. . .”
Then he turned and walked down the stairway.
Charles Bukowski
607
He was alone. No bodyguards, no bikers. Nice kid, nice smile.
Goodbye, Jack Bledsoe.
I wormed another bottle out of Carl Wilson and Sarah and I stood around with
the other people but actually nothing was occurring. Just people standing around.
Maybe they were waiting for me to get drunk and insane and abusive like I some¬
times did at parties. But I doubted that. They were just dull inside. There was
nothing for them to do but stay within the self that was not quite there. That
wasn’t too painful. It was a soft place to be.
With me, my main vision for life was to avoid as many people as possible.
The less people I saw the better I felt. I met one other man, once, who shared
my philosophy, Sam the Whorehouse Man. He lived in the court behind mine
in East Hollywood. He was on ATD.
“Hank,” he told me, “when I was doing time, I was always in trouble. The
warden kept throwing me in the hole. But I liked the hole. The warden would
come around and lift the lid and look in, and he asked me one time, ‘HAVE YOU
HAD ENOUGH? ARE YOU READY TO COME OUT OF THERE?’ I took a
piece of my shit and threw it up and hit him in the face. He closed the lid and
left me down there. I just stayed in there. When the warden came back he didn ’t
lift the lid all the way. ‘WELL, HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH YET?’ ‘NOT AT
ALL,’ I yelled back. Finally the warden had me pulled out of there. ‘HE EN¬
JOYS IT TOO MUCH,’he told the guards. ‘GET HIS ASS OUT OF THERE!’ ”
Sam was a great guy, then he got to gambling. He couldn’t pay his rent, he
was always in Gardena, he slept in the crappers there and began gambling again
as soon as he woke up. Finally Sam got tossed out of his apartment. I traced him
to a tiny room down in the Korean district. He was sitting in a comer.
“Hank, all I can do is drink milk but it comes right up. But the doctors say
there is nothing wrong with me.”
Two weeks later he was dead. This man who shared my philosophy about
people.
“Listen,” I said to Sarah, “there’s nothing happening here. This is death. Let’s
leave.”
“We have all the free drinks we want...”
“It’s not worth it.”
“But the night is young, maybe something will happen.”
“Not unless I make it happen and I’m not in the mood.”
“Let’s wait just a little while . . .”
I knew what she meant. For us it was the end of Hollywood. All in all, she
cared more for that world than I did. Not much, but some. She had begun study¬
ing to be an actor.
6o8
Writers
Still it was just people standing, that’s all. The women weren’t beautiful and
the men weren’t interesting. It was duller than dull. The dullness actually hurt.
“I’m going to crack unless we get out of here,” I told Sarah.
“All right,” she said, “let’s leave.”
Good old Frank was downstairs with the limo.
“You’re leaving early,” he said.
“Uh huh,” I said.
Frank placed us in the back and we found a new bottle of wine in the limo.
We uncorked it as our trusty man found the Harbor Freeway south.
“Hey, Frank, want a drink?”
“Sure as shit, man!”
He hit a button and the little glass partition dropped. I slipped the bottle
through.
As Frank drove the limo along he took a hit from the wine bottle. I don ’ t know
but somehow it all looked very strange and funny and Sarah and I started laugh¬
ing.
At last, the night was alive.
Cbitics
Graham Greene
Reviewing a spy movie, I once described the job of being a professional Cold War wire-
tapper: "You sit for long hours in a dark, cold room, with peopleyou don’t like, listen¬
ing to strangers making love, and waiting for something to happen. Not unlike being a
film critic. ” While the profession (ffilm criticism has been ennobled by some of its prac¬
titioners, the job itself is a very strange one. You attend one, two, or three movies a day
(more during film festivals), taking notes or not, emerging forfive minutes or an hour in
between to blink in the daylight, and then you try to describe what happened to you. The
British novelist Graham Greene (1904—1991) did this job for nearly five years, succeed¬
ing in the process in libeling Shirley Temple.
“Memories of a Film Critic”
Four and a half years of watching films several times a week ... I can hardly
believe in that life of the distant thirties now, a way of life which I adopted quite
voluntarily from a sense of fun. More than four hundred films—and I suppose
there would have been many, many more if I had not suffered during the same
period from other obsessions—four novels had to be written, not to speak of a
travel book which took me away for months to Mexico, far from the Pleasure
Dome—all those Empires and Odeons of a luxury and an extravagance which
we shall never see again. How, I find myself wondering, could I possibly have
written all those film reviews? And yet 1 remember opening the envelopes, which
contained the gilded cards of invitation for the morning press performances
(mornings when I should have been struggling with other work), with a sense
of curiosity and anticipation. Those films were an escape—escape from that hell¬
ish problem of construction in Chapter Six, from the secondary character who
obstinately refused to come alive, escape for an hour and a half from the melan-
6 1 1
Critics
6 i 2
choly which falls inexorably round the novelist when he has lived for too many
months on end in his private world.
The idea of reviewing films came to me at a cocktail party after the danger¬
ous third martini. I was talking to Derek Verschoyle, the Literary Editor of the
Spectator. The Spectator had hitherto neglected films and I suggested to him I
should fill the gap—I thought in the unlikely event of his accepting my offer it
might be fun for two or three weeks. I never imagined it would remain fun for
four and a half years and only end in a different world, a world at war. Until I
came to reread the notices the other day I thought they abruptly ended with my
review of Young Mr. Lincoln. If there is something a little absentminded about
that review, it is because, just as I began to write it on the morning of 3 Sep¬
tember 1939, the first air-raid siren of the war sounded and I laid the review
aside so as to make notes from my high Hampstead lodging on the destruction
of London below. “Woman passes with dog on lead,” I noted, “and pauses by
lamp-post.” Then the all-clear sounded and I returned to Henry Fonda.
My first script—about 1937—was a terrible affair and typical in one way of
the cinema world. I had to adapt a story of John Galsworthy—a traditional tale
of a murderer who killed himself and an innocent man who was hanged for the
suicide’s crime. If the story had any force in it at all it lay in its extreme sensa¬
tionalism, but as the sensation was impossible under the British Board of Film
Censors, who forbade suicide and forbade a failure of English justice, there was
little of Galsworthy’s plot left when I had finished. This unfortunate first effort
was suffered with good-humoured nonchalance by Laurence Olivier and Vivien
Leigh. I decided after that never to adapt another man’s work and I have only
broken that rule once in the case of Saint Joan —the critics will say another de¬
plorable adaptation, though I myself would defend the script for retaining,
however rearranged, Shaw’s epilogue and for keeping a sense of responsibility
to another while reducing a play of three-and-a-half hours to a film of less than
two.
I have a more deplorable confession—a film story directed by Mr. William
Cameron Menzies called The Green Cockatoo starring Mr. John Mills—perhaps
it preceded the Galsworthy (the Freudian Censor is at work here). The script
of Brighton Rock I am ready to defend. There were good scenes, but the Boult¬
ing Brothers were too generous in giving an apprentice his rope, and the film-
censor as usual was absurd—the script was slashed to pieces by the Mr. Watkyn
of his day. There followed two halcyon years with Carol Reed, and I began to
believe that I was learning the craft with The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, but
it was an illusion. No craft had been learnt, there had only been the luck of work¬
ing with a fine director who could control his actors and his production.
If you sell a novel outright you accept no responsibility: but write your own
script and you will observe what can happen on the floor to your words, your
Graham Greene 613
continuity, your idea, the extra dialogue inserted during production (for which
you bear the critics’ blame), the influence of an actor who is only concerned
with the appearance he wants to create before his fans. . . . Perhaps you will
come to think, there may be a solution if the author takes his hand in its pro¬
duction.
Those were not the first film reviews I wrote. At Oxford I had appointed my¬
self film critic of the Ox/ord Outlook, a literary magazine which appeared once a
term and which I edited. Warning Shadows, Brumes d'Automne, The Student of
Prague —these are the silent films of the twenties of which I can remember
whole scenes still. I was a passionate reader of Close-Up which was edited by Ken¬
neth Macpherson and Bryher and published from a chateau in Switzerland. Marc
Allegret was the Paris Correspondent and Pudovkin contributed articles on
montage. I was horrified by the arrival of “talkies” (it seemed the end of film as
an art form), just as later 1 regarded colour with justifiable suspicion. “Techni¬
color,” I wrote in 193s, “plays havoc with the women’s faces; they all, young
and old, have the same healthy weather-beaten skins.” Curiously enough it was
a detective story with Chester Morris which converted me to the talkies—for
the first time in that picture I was aware of selected sounds: until then every shoe
had squeaked and every door handle had creaked. I notice that the forgotten film
Becky Sharp gave me even a certain hope for colour.
Re-reading those reviews of more than forty years ago I find many pre¬
judices which are modified now only by the sense of nostalgia. I had distinct
reservations about Greta Garbo whom I compared to a beautiful Arab mare,
and Hitchcock’s “inadequate sense of reality” irritated me and still does—how
inexcusibly he spoilt The Thirty-Nine Steps. 1 still believe 1 was right (whatever
Monsieur Truffaut may say) when I wrote: “His films consist of a series of small
‘amusing’ melodramatic situations: the murderer’s button dropped on the bac¬
carat board; the strangled organist’s hands prolonging the notes in the empty
church . . . very perfunctorily he builds up to these tricky situations (paying no
attention on the way to inconsistencies, loose ends, psychological absurdities)
and then drops them: they mean nothing: they lead to nothing.”
The thirties too were a period of “respectable” film biographies—Rhodes,
Zola, Pasteur, Parnell and the like—and of historical romances which only
came to a certain comic life in the hands of Cecil B. de Mille (Richard Coeur de
Lion was married to Berengaria according to the rites of the Anglican Church).
I preferred the Westerns, the crime films, the farces, the frankly commercial,
and I am glad to see that in reviewing one of these forgotten commercial films
I gave a warm welcome to a new star, Ingrid Bergman—“What star before has
made her first appearance on the international screen with a highlight gleaming
on her nose-tip?”
There were dangers, I was to discover, in film-reviewing. On one occasion
Critics
614
I opened a letter to find a piece of shit enclosed. I have always—though proba¬
bly incorrectly—believed that it was a piece of aristocratic shit, for I had made
cruel fun a little while before of a certain French marquis who had made a doc¬
umentary film in which he played a rather heroic role. Thirty years later in Paris
at a dinner of the haute bourgeoisie I sat opposite him and was charmed by his con¬
versation. I longed to ask him the truth, but I was daunted by the furniture. Then,
of course, there was the Shirley Temple libel action. The review of Wee Willie
Winkie which set Twentieth-Century Fox alight cannot be found here for obvi¬
ous reasons. I kept on my bathroom wall, until a bomb removed the wall, the
statement of claim—that I had accused Twentieth-Century Fox of “procuring”
Miss Temple for “immoral purposes” (I had suggested that she had a certain adroit
coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men). Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief
Justice, sent the papers in the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions, so
that ever since that time I have been traceable on the files of Scotland Yard. The
case appeared before the King’s Bench on 22 March 1938, with myself in ab¬
sentia, and on 23 May 1938, the following account of the hearing appeared
among the Law Reports of The Times. I was at the time in Mexico on a writing
assignment. It is perhaps worth mentioning in connection with the “beastly pub¬
lication” that Night and Day boasted Elizabeth Bowen as theatre critic, Evelyn
Waugh as chief book reviewer, Osbert Lancaster as art critic, and Hugh Casson
as architectural critic, not to speak of such regular contributors as Herbert
Read, Hugh Kingsmill and Malcolm Muggeridge.
The case appeared as follows in The Times Law Reports:
HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
King's Bench Division
Libel on Miss Shirley Temple: A Gross Outrage’
Temple and Others v. Night and Day Magazine.
Limited, and Others
Before the Lord Chief Justice
A settlement was announced of this libel action which was brought by Miss
Shirley Jane Temple, the child actress (by Mr Roy Simmonds, her next friend),
Twentieth-Century Fox Film Corporation, of New York, and Twentieth-Century
Fox Film Company Limited, of Berners Street, W., against Night and Day Mag¬
azines, Limited, and Mr Graham Greene, of St Martin's Lane, W.C., and Messrs
Chatto and Windus, publishers, of Chandos Street, W.C., in respect of an arti¬
cle written by Mr Greene and published in the issue of the magazine Night and
Day dated October 28, 1937.
Sir Patrick Hastings, KC, and Mr G.O. Slade appeared for the plaintiffs; Mr
Valentine Holmes for all the defendants except Hazell, Watson, and Viney, Lim¬
ited, who were represented by Mr Theobald Mathew.
Graham Greene
6ij
Sir Patrick Hastings, in announcing the settlement, by which it was agreed that
Miss Shirley Temple was to receive £2,000, the film corporation £1,000 and the
film company £500, stated that the first defendants were the proprietors of the
magazine Night and Day, which was published in London. It was only right to say
that the two last defendants, the printers and publishers, were firms of the ut¬
most respectability and highest reputation, and were innocently responsible in
the matter.
The plaintiff, Miss Shirley Temple, a child of nine years, has a world-wide rep¬
utation as an artist in films. The two plaintiff companies produced her in a film
called Wee Willie Winkie, based on Rudyard Kipling's story.
On October 28 last year Night and Day Magazines, Limited, published an ar¬
ticle written by Mr Graham Greene. In his (counsel’s) view it was one of the most
horrible libels that one could well imagine. Obviously he would not read it all—
it was better that he should not—but a glance at the statement of claim, where
a poster was set out, was quite sufficient to show the nature of the libel written
about this child.
This beastly publication, said counsel, was written, and it was right to say that
every respectable distributor in London refused to be a party to selling it.
Notwithstanding that, the magazine company, with the object no doubt of in¬
creasing the sale, proceeded to advertise the fact that it had been banned.
Shirley T emple was an American and lived in America. If she had been in Eng¬
land and the publication in America it would have been right for the American
Courts to have taken notice of it. It was equally right that, the position being re¬
versed, her friends in America should know that the Courts here took notice of
such a publication.
SHOULD NOT BE TREATED LIGHTLY
Money was no object in this case. The child had a very large income and the
two film companies were wealthy concerns. It was realised, however, that the
matter should not be treated lightly. The defendants had paid the film companies
£1,000 and £joo respectively, and that money would be disposed of in a chari¬
table way. With regard to the child, she would be paid £2,000. There would also
be an order for the taxation of costs.
In any view, said counsel, it was such a beastly libel to have written that if it
had been a question of money it would have been difficult to say what would be
an appropriate amount to arrive at.
Miss Shirley Temple probably knew nothing of the article, and it was unde¬
sirable that she should be brought to England to fight the action. In his (coun¬
sel’s) opinion the settlement was a proper one in the circumstances.
Mr Valentine Holmes informed his Lordship that the magazine Night and Day had
ceased publication. He desired, on behalf of his clients, to express the deepest
apology to Miss Temple for the pain which certainly would have been caused to
her by the article if she had read it. He also apologized to the two film compa¬
nies for the suggestion that they would produce and distribute a film of the char-
6 l 6
Critics
acter indicated by the article. There was no justification for the criticism of the
film, which, his clients instructed him, was one which anybody could take their
children to see. He also apologized on behalf ofMr Graham Greene. So far as the
publishers of the magazine were concerned, they did not see the article before
publication.
His Lordship —Who is the author of this article?
Mr Holmes —Mr Graham Greene.
His Lordship —Is he within the jurisdiction?
Mr Holmes —I am afraid 1 do not know, my Lord.
Mr Theobald Mathew, on behalf of the printers, said that they recognized
that the article was one which ought never to have been published.
The fact that the film had already been licensed for universal exhi¬
bition refuted the charges which had been made in the article. The
printers welcomed the opportunity of making any amends in their
power.
His Lordship —Can you tell me where Mr Greene is?
Mr Mathew — 1 have no information on the subject.
His Lordship —This libel is simply a gross outrage, and I will take care to
see that suitable attention is directed to it. In the meantime I assent
to the settlement on the terms which have been disclosed, and the
record will be withdrawn.
From film-reviewing it was only a small step to script writing. That also was a
danger, but a necessary one as I now had a wife and two children to support and
I remained in debt to my publishers until the war came. I had persistently at¬
tacked the films made by Mr. Alexander Korda and perhaps he became curious
to meet his enemy. He asked my agent to bring me to Denham Film Studios and
when we were alone he asked if I had any film story in mind. I had none, so I
began to improvise a thriller—early morning on Platform i at Paddington, the
platform empty, except for one man who is waiting for the last train from
Wales. From below his raincoat a trickle of blood forms a pool on the platform.
“Yes? And then?”
“It would take too long to tell you the whole plot—and the idea needs a lot
more working out.”
I left Denham half an hour later to work for eight weeks on what seemed an
extravagant salary, and the worst and least successful of Korda’s productions thus
began (all I can remember is the title, The Green Cockatoo). So too began our
friendship which endured and deepened till his death, in spite of my reviews
whichremained unfavourable. There was never a man who bore less malice, and
I think of him with affection—even love—as the only film producer I have ever
known with whom I could spend days and nights of conversation without so
Graham Greene
617
much as mentioning the cinema. Years later, after the war was over, I wrote
two screenplays for Korda and Carol Reed, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man,
and I hope they atoned a little for the prentice scripts.
If 1 had remained a film critic, the brief comic experience which 1 had then
of Hollywood might have been of lasting value to me, for I learned at first hand
what a director may have to endure at the hands of a producer. (One of the dif¬
ficult tasks of a critic is to assign his praise or blame to the right comer.)
David Selznick, famous for having produced one of the world’s top-grossing
films, Gone with the Wind, held the American rights in The Third Man and, by the
terms of the contract with Korda, the director was bound to consult him about
the script sixty days before shooting began. So Carol Reed, who was directing
the film, and I journeyed west. Our first meeting with Selznick at La Jolla in
California promised badly, and the dialogue remains as fresh in my mind as the
day when it was spoken. After a brief greeting he got down to serious discus¬
sion. He said, “I don’t like the title.”
“No? We thought . . .”
“Listen, boys, who the hell is going to a film called The Third Man?”
“Well,” I said, “it’s a simple title. It’s easily remembered.”
Selznick shook his head reproachfully. “You can do better than that, Graham,”
he said, using my Christian name with a readiness I was not prepared for. “You
are a writer. A good writer. I’m no writer, but you are. Now what we want—
it’s not right, mind you, of course, it’s not right, I’m not saying it’s right, but
then I’m no writer and you are, what we want is something like Night in Vienna,
a title which will bring them in.”
“Graham and I will think about it,” Carol Reed interrupted with haste. It was
a phrase I was to hear Reed frequently repeat, for the Korda contract had omit¬
ted to state that the director was under any obligation to accept Selznick’s ad¬
vice. Reed during the days that followed, like an admirable stonewaller, blocked
every ball.
We passed on to Selznick’s view of the story.
“It won’t do boys,” he said, “it won’t do. It’s sheer buggery.”
“Buggery?”
“It’s what you leam in your English schools.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This guy comes to Vienna looking for his friend. He finds his friend’s dead.
Right? Why doesn’t he go home then?”
After all the months of writing, his destructive view of the whole venture left
me speechless. He shook his grey head at me. “It’s just buggery, boys.”
I began weakly to argue. I said, “But this character—he has a motive of re¬
venge. He has been beaten up by a military policeman.” I played a last card.
“Within twenty-four hours he’s in love with Harry Lime’s girl.”
Selznick shook his head sadly. “Why didn’t he go home before that?”
6 i 8
Critics
That, I think, was the end of the first day’s conference. Selznick removed to
Hollywood and we followed him—to a luxurious suite in Santa Monica, once
the home of Hearst’s film-star mistress. During the conference which followed
I remember there were times when there seemed to be a kind of grim reason
in Selznick s criticisms—surely here perhaps there was a fault in “continuity.” I
hadn’t properly “established” this or that. (I would forget momentarily the les¬
son which I had learned as a film critic—that to “establish” something is almost
invariably wrong and that “continuity” is often the enemy of life. Jean Cocteau
has even argued that the mistakes of continuity belong to the unconscious po¬
etry of a film.) A secretary sat by Selznick’s side with her pencil poised. When
I was on the point of agreement Carol Reed would quickly interrupt—“Gra¬
ham and I will think about it.”
There was one conference which I remember in particular because it was the
last before we were due to return to England. The secretary had made forty pages
of notes by this time, but she had been unable to record one definite concession
on our side. The conference began as usual about 10.30 p.m. and finished after
4 a.m. Always by the time we reached Santa Monica dawn would be touching
the Pacific.
“There’s something I don’t understand in this script, Graham. Why the hell
does Harry Lime . . . ?” He described some extraordinary action on Lime’s part.
“But he doesn’t,” I said.
Selznick looked at me for a moment in silent amazement.
“Christ, boys,” he said, “I’m thinking of a different script.”
He lay down on his sofa and crunched a benzedrine. In ten minutes he was
as fresh as ever, unlike ourselves.
I look back on David Selznick now with affection. The forty pages of notes
remained unopened in Reed’s files, and since the film has proved a success, I
suspect Selznick forgot that the criticisms had ever been made. Indeed, when
next I was in New York he invited me to lunch to discuss a project. He said,
“Graham, I’ve got a great idea for a film. It’s just made for you.”
I had been careful on this occasion not to take a third martini.
“The life of St. Mary Magdalene,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “no. It’s not really in my line.”
He didn’t try to argue. “I have another idea,” he said. “It will appeal to you
as a Catholic. You know how next year they have what’s called the Holy Year
in Rome. Well, I want to make a picture called The Unholy Year. It will show all
the commercial rackets that go on, the crooks . .
“An interesting notion,” 1 said.
“We’ll shoot it in the Vatican.”
“I doubt if they will give you permission for that.”
“Oh sure they will,” he said. “You see, we’ll write in one Good Character.”
Dwight Macdonald 619
(I am reminded by this story of another memorable lunch in a suite at the
Dorchester when Sam Zimbalist asked me if I would revise the last part of a script
which had been prepared for a remake of Ben Hut. “You see,” he said, “we find
a kind of anti-climax after the Crucifixion.”)
Those indeed were the days. I little knew that the reign of Kubla Khan was
nearly over and that the Pleasure Dome would soon be converted into an enor¬
mous bingo hall, which would provide other dreams to housewives than had the
Odeons and the Empires. I had regretted the silent films when the talkies moved
in and 1 had regretted black and white when Technicolor washed across the
screen. So today, watching the latest soft-porn film, I sometimes long for those
dead thirties, for Cecil B. de Mille and his Crusaders, for the days when almost
anything was likely to happen.
Dwicht Macdonald
It was Dwight Macdonald (1906—1982), writing every month in Esquire in the 1950s
and early 1960s, whofirst led me to begin thinking about movies in the way a critic might.
His criticism, month after month, was some of the best ever written in America, and a lot
of it is collected in On Movies, a book now out of print but worth searching for. In his
introduction he discusses in a general way what a critic should, and should not, look for
in a movie. When I began writing reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times, 1 read this essay
about once a month.
from On Movies
I know something about cinema after forty years, and being a congenital critic,
I know what I like and why. But I can’t explain the why except in terms of the
specific work under consideration, on which I’m copious enough. The general
theory, the larger view, the gestalt—these have always eluded me. Whether this
Critics
620
gap in my critical armor be called an idiosyncrasy or, less charitably, a personal
failing, it has always been most definitely there.
But people, especially undergraduates hot for certainty, keep asking me what
rules, principles or standards I judge movies by—a fair question to which I can
never think of an answer. Years ago, some forgotten but evidently sharp stim¬
ulus spurred me to put some guidelines down on paper. The result, hitherto un¬
printed for reason which will become clear, was:
1. Are the characters consistent, and in fact are there characters at all?
2. Is it true to life?
3. Is the photography cliche, or is it adapted to the particular film and
therefore original?
4. Do the parts go together; do they add up to something; is there a rhythm
established so that there is form, shape, climax, building up tension and
exploding it?
j. Is there a mind behind it; is there a feeling that a single intelligence has
imposed his own view on the material?
The last two questions rough out some vague sort of meaning, and the third is
sound, if truistic. But I can’t account for the first two being there at all, let alone
in the lead-off place. Many films I admire are not “true to life” unless that
stretchable term is strained beyond normal usage: Broken Blossoms, Children of Par¬
adise, Zero de Conduite, Caligari, On Approval, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. And
some have no “characters” at all, consistent or no: Potemkin, Arsenal, October, In¬
tolerance, Marienbad, Orpheus, Olympia. The comedies of Kenton, Chaplin, Lu-
bitsch, the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields occupy a middle ground. They have
“consistent” characters all right, and they are also “true to life.” But the consis¬
tency is always extreme and sometimes positively compulsive and obsessed (W.
C., Groucho, Buster), and the truth is abstract. In short, they are so highly styl¬
ized (cf. “the Lubitsch touch”) that they are constantly floating up from terrafirma
into the empyrean of art, right before my astonished and delighted eyes.
The first half of Keaton’s Sherlock Junior, for example, is one of those genre come¬
dies of calflove that the more earthbound Harold Lloyd specialized in. It’s set
in a small town whose streets, houses, and interiors are photographed with that
sharp realism common in our silent comedies (what an accurate, detailed fam¬
ily album of how America used to look!). It is populated by the commonplace
types of the period (given the usual comic twist that exaggerates them into folk-
mythical grotesques, just as the prosaic policeman was metamorphosed into the
Mack Sennett cop). But the second half of Sherlock Junior cuts loose from these
Dwight Macdonald 62 i
mooring strings and drifts free across magical country. By a great stroke of in¬
vention, the lovesick Buster is a movie projectionist, so that the medium becomes
the artist’s material—an advanced approach Keaton undoubtedly never heard
of and wouldn’t have understood if he had. He falls asleep in his projection booth,
dreaming about his girl and his frustrated love. His doppelganger extracts itself
from his sleeping body, takes off its hook the ghost of the Keaton pancake hat,
literally a “lid” (the real lid still hanging there: a nice touch), claps it on his head,
and walks down the aisle of the darkened theatre to climb up on the stage and
step into the society-crook melodrama being projected on the screen. The char¬
acters become transformed into his girl, her parents, his rival, and himself, all
of them dressed to the nines. As the great detective, Buster sports a soup-and-
fish outfit, slightly baggy in the seat and gaping in the wing collar, but includ¬
ing a magnificently draped watch chain he twirls with uneasy insouciance.
The rest of the film—except for a brief and funny real-life coda—chronically
violates every natural law except that of optics (movie optics, that is). In one
sequence, the background keeps shifting arbitrarily, crossing up Buster who
jumps into a ravine and lands on a rock in the midst of a choppy sea, into which
he dives, only to sprawl on his face in the sands of a desert. In another, he es¬
capes from gangsters who have him trapped in a dead-end street by taking a run¬
ning dive through a large square aperture which, by raising her tray, a motherly
old lady selling pencils opens up not only in her own midriff but also in the wall
behind her. There’s no explanation of this or any other lapsus naturalis in this
1924 film which makes later efforts by Dali, Buriuel, and Cocteau look pedes¬
trian and a bit timid. They felt obliged to clarify matters by a symbolistic appa¬
ratus. Keaton never rose—or sunk—to that.
T. S. Eliot summed it all up long ago with his usual laconic authority: “The
egregious merit of Chaplin is that he has escaped in his own way from the realm
of the cinema and invented a rhythm. Of course, the unexplored possibilities of
the cinema for eluding realism must be very great.” (I especially like that off¬
hand “of course.”) This prophetic aperfu is one that recent explorations by
Bergman, Fellini, Resnais, and other contemporary masters into the “possibili¬
ties for eluding realism” are beginning to illustrate two generations later.
Getting back to general principles, I can think offhand (the only way I seem able
to think about general principles) of two ways to judge the quality of a movie.
They are mere rules of thumb, but they work—for me anyway:
A. Did it change the way you look at things?
B. Did you find more (or less) in it the second, third, nth time? (Also, how
did it stand up over the years, after one or more “periods” of cinematic
history?)
622
Critics
Both rules are post facto and so, while they may be helpful to critics and au¬
diences, they aren’t of the slightest use to those who make movies. This is as it
should be. The critic’s job doesn’t include second-guessing the director by giv¬
ing him helpful suggestions as to how he might have made a better film. If the
director knows his business, such “constructive criticism” (as it’s called by sin¬
cere philistines in the boondocks and by insincere philistines on Madison Av¬
enue—which might be called a metropolitan boondock) is an impertinence.* If
a director doesn’t know his business, which is not uncommon, it’s an irrelevance.
Of all the sources from which he might get wised up—agents, girl friends, col¬
leagues, observant cutters, perceptive grips, Mom, Dad, Billy Graham, Chris¬
tian Science—the least likely is by reading the reviews of his stillborn creations.
The intelligent ones will mystify and depress him, and the dumb ones will tell
him he’s doing just fine.
Shifting the focus from the director to the critic (and paraphrasing Groucho),
I wouldn’t want to see a movie by a director who had to learn to make movies
from my reviews. They say it’s easy enough to be critical, or negative, or de¬
structive, but it isn’t really. To stick to serious, negative, unconstructive criti¬
cism takes a lot of thought and effort. In this country today, the undertow
pulling the critic into the dangerous waters of positive, responsible thinking
seems to be getting stronger every year. In forty years I can’t recall anything
I’ve written that has had a specific, definable effect on anybody connected with
the making of movies. I’ve encouraged some directors to persist, but since all
directors appear to persist unto death (and sometimes afterward, it seems)
there’s no way to tell. The only hard evidence would be the opposite: my suc¬
cess in encouraging directors and actors to get out of movies and into something
better suited to their talents, like selling insurance or becoming the bursar of a
small denominational college in upper Michigan.
♦The director’s business, of course, may not coincide with the critic's business. William Wyler, to take the first
Hollywood veteran that comes to mind, knows by now (as he should) just how to make a slickly-machined,
chromium-plated Hollywood movie. But his business has never come close to mine. Looking over the two inches
of his film credits in Leslie Halliwell’s useful reference book TheFilmgoers Companion I find many pretentious mid¬
dlebrow duds like Wuthering Heights, Dead End, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Children s Hour, and many films like
Ben-Hur and The Friendly Persuasion that are unpretentious lowbrow duds. In all this industrious manufacture,
there’s nothing except Detective Story, a sound melodrama, that I recall with even the mild pleasure evoked by four
or five of the almost-as-many films of Billy Wilder—another old Hollywood hand (or hack) often confused with
William Wilder, but more lively and talented. Not very much more—only enough to be visible on the Hollywood
scale, where the local Doctor Johnsons don’t disdain to settle the precedence between a flea and a louse. Quite
the contrary, it’s their main occupation.
Andrew S a r r i s
623
Andrew Sarkis
Andrew Sarris is one of the high priests of American film criticism, best known for having
introduced the French auteur theory offilm criticism to this country in his irfluential weekly
column for the Village Voice. His The American Cinema went so far as to rank Amer¬
ican directors in various categories oj importance and relevance, beginning with The Pan¬
theon (Hawks, Hitchcock, etc.) and moving on to The Far Side of Paradise and Less
than Meets the Eye. Understandably this hierarchy, which was compiled with at least
the tip of his tongue in his cheek, inspired outrage. But both Sarris’s supporters and op¬
ponents tended to focus on the auteur component in his work, overlooking the countless
reviews in which he was applying no theory and was simply an intelligent man writing
well about a movie he had just seen. Here he looks back in wonder at the furor he stirred.
from Confessions of a Cultist
My career as a cultist began unobtrusively, if not inadvertently, in a dingy rail¬
road flat on New York’s Lower East Side back in the unlamented Eisenhower
era. It was there and then that I first met Jonas and Adolf as Mekas, the genially
bohemian (actually Lithuanian) editors of a new magazine called Film Culture, an
unfortunately pompous title that always made me think of microbic movies under
glass. I had been taking an evening course in film appreciation at Columbia be¬
tween meandering through graduate English and malingering in Teachers Col¬
lege. The movie mentor was Roger Tilton, a film-maker (Jazz Dance) himself
and one of Film Culture’s first sponsors, whatever that meant. (Among other
“sponsors” listed on a back page were James Agee, Shirley Clarke, David and
Francis Flaherty, Lewis Jacobs, Arthur Knight, Flelen Levitt, Len Lye, Hans
Richter, Willard Van Dyke and Amos Vogel.) Tilton sent me to the Mekas broth¬
ers, and the rest is cult history.
The brothers Mekas were generally buried under a pile of manuscripts rang-
624 Critics
ing from the illegible to the unreadable, and I am afraid I only added to the con¬
fusion. The entire operation seemed hopelessly impractical to a congenital pes¬
simist like me. I took the satirical view that we were not poor because we were
pure, but pure because we were poor, and our integrity was directly propor¬
tional to our obscurity. Still, I suppose we represented a new breed of film critic.
The cultural rationale for our worthier predecessors—Agee, Ferguson, Levin,
Murphy, Sherwood, et at .—was that they were too good to be reviewing movies.
We, on the contrary, were not considered much good for anything else. Like
one-eyed lemmings, we plunged headlong into the murky depths of specializa¬
tion. No back pages of literary and political pulps for us. We may have lived in
a ramshackle house, but we always came in the front door.
Somehow, thefirstissue of Film Culture —January 1955, Volume I, Number
1—had already materialized without my assistance. I was enlisted as a reviewer
and editor for Number 2. I recall that I was not enchanted by the prospect of
writing and editing for no money at all. It seemed almost as demeaning as pay¬
ing to be published, an act of vanity I vowed never to perform even at the cost
of immortality. However, my bargaining position was not enhanced by the fact
that all my previous professional writing credits added up to seven movie
columns in the Fort Devens Dispatch, within the period of my tour of duty
through the Army’s movie houses during the Korean war.
At the time I started writing in Film Culture I was not quite twenty-seven years
old, a dangerously advanced age for a writer manque if not maudit, a dreadfully
uncomfortable age for a middle-class cultural guerrilla without any base, con¬
tacts, or reliable lines of supply. I was of the same generation as Norman Pod-
horetz, but while he had been “making it” as an undergraduate at Columbia I
had drifted, like Jack Kerouac, down from Momingside Heights ever deeper into
the darkness of movie houses, not so much in search of a vocation as in flight
from the laborious realities of careerism. Nonetheless I agree with Podhoretz
that failure is more banal and more boring than success. Indeed, I have always
been impatient as a critic with characters (like Ginger Coffey) who manage to
mess up every job. The trouble with failure as a subject is that it is not instruc¬
tive in any way and only contributes to an audience’s false sense of superiority.
Unfortunately, success stories lack “charm” unless they are leavened with
audience-pleasing intimations of futility. The trick of the stand-up comic and the
syndicated columnist is to ingratiate himself with his audience by groveling in
his own weaknesses and misfortunes, real and fabricated, while withholding all
the evidence of his manipulative personality. This strategy evolves from a con¬
spiracy of the successful to delude the unsuccessful into thinking that worldly
success doesn’t really matter. But as I look back upon my own failures I am ap¬
palled by my unoriginal reactions of self-hatred and meanspirited paranoia.
Every block and hang-up known to the disenfranchised intellect seemed at the
Andrew Sa rris
625
time uniquely personal and chock-full of anecdotal fascination. My biggest
problem was focusing my general knowledge on a specific intellectual target.
Novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poems slithered off my typewriter in
haphazard spasms of abortive creation. Far from filling up trunks, I could barely
jam up a drawer, and yet if I had been knowledgeable enough to understand the
fantastic odds against me, I might never have invested in a typewriter. As it was,
I was not even sophisticated enough to realize what a stroke of luck my meet¬
ing with the Mekas brothers turned out to be. I was always looking beyond Film
Culture (and later the Village Voice) for more lucrative opportunities elsewhere.
There was never a time that I would not have given up being a cultist to be a ca¬
reerist. And then one day—I don’t remember exactly when—I realized that
if I had not yet indeed succeeded, I had at least stopped failing. I had managed
at long last to function in a role I had improvised with my left hand while my
right hand was knocking at all the doors of the Establishment. I had written and
published a million words under my own name, and I had made contact with
thousands of people, and in the process I had managed to locate myself while
mediating between my readers and the screen.
In the realm of role-playing, I stopped lowering my head at the epithet
“cultist” as soon as I realized that the quasi-religious connotation of the term was
somewhat justified for those of us who loved movies beyond all reason. No less
a cultist than the late Andre Bazin had once likened film festivals to religious re¬
vivals, and a long sojourn in Paris in 1961 reassured me that film not only de¬
manded but deserved as much faith as did any other cultural discipline. (Cultists
and buffs in other areas are generally described as scholars and specialists, but
interdisciplinary intolerance seems to be the eternal reaction of the old against
the new.) As I remember that fateful year in Paris, deliriously prolonged con¬
versations at sidewalk cafes still assault my ears with what in Paris passed for pro¬
fundity and in New Y ork for peculiarity. I have never really recovered from the
Parisian heresy (in New York eyes) concerning the sacred importance of the cin¬
ema. Hence I returned to New York not merely a cultist but a subversive cultist
with a foreign ideology.
Thereafter I could see more clearly that the main difference between a cultist
and a careerist is that the cultist does not require the justification of a career to
pursue his passion, and the careerist does. Indeed, passion is too strong a word
to apply to journalistic reviewers who would be equally happy in the Real Es¬
tate departments of their publications, or to high-brow humanists who admire
the late Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Flitler simply because they, like
Kracauer, are more interested in Hitler than in Caligari. Of course, lacking in¬
tellectual discipline, the passion of a cultist could be perverted into mindless mys¬
ticism and infantile irrationality. (I must admit that I had qualms about the title
of this book after glancing at the lurid Daily News headline shortly after the
626
Critics
Sharon Tate murders: “Police Seek Cultists.”) Still, film scholarship was in such
a shambles by the early sixties that the risks of passion were preferable to the
rigidities of professionalism.
As I look back on the past I have very mixed feelings about all the slights I
have suffered and all the furors I have caused. People were always telling me
that I was lucky to be attacked in print and that the only thing that really mat¬
tered was the correct spelling of my name. However, it has been my observa¬
tion that no one enjoys being attacked in print or in person no matter what
publicity may accrue from the aggression. Indeed, I have been struck by the
inability of critics who love dishing out abuse to take the mildest reproof in re¬
turn. For myself, I can’t really complain in terms of any Kantian categorical
imperative. He who lives by the sword of criticism must expect counterthrusts
as a matter of course. All that is required of the embattled critic as a test of his
courage is that he never lose faith in his own judgment. And all the slings and
arrows of outraged opponents never led me to doubt the direction 1 had chosen
as a critic. Part of my intransigence may be attributed to the relative ignorance
that my generally bookish attackers displayed in the movie medium. Not that
I believe (as do the maxi-McLuhanists) that books have become culturally
irrelevant. On the contrary, every aspect of culture is relevant to every other
aspect, and the best criticism, like the best poetry, is that which is richest in as¬
sociations. Unfortunately, too many bookish film critics have perverted the no¬
tion of ecumenical erudition by snobbishly subordinating film to every other art.
Whereas the late James Agee discovered cinema through his love for movies,
too many of his self-proclaimed successors chose to abuse movies in the name
of Kultur.
Hence I was the beneficiary as well as the victim of the intellectual vacuum
that occurred in movie reviewing with the death of Agee in 19 j j. For reasons
that I still do not fully understand, serious film reviewing on a steady basis had
fallen into cultural disrepute when I started breaking into print. My very exis¬
tence was generally ignored for almost eight years, a period in which I was
occasionally quoted without credit. Then in 196 3 I rose from obscurity to no¬
toriety by being quoted out of context. Even so, I was treated as a relatively
unique phenomenon, however invidious to the cultural establishment. The late
New Y ork Herald Tribune even listed me as one of the phrase-makers of the avant-
garde, a distinction that helped keep me unemployable as far as the Establish¬
ment was concerned. I didn’t realize at the time that slowly but surely was
gathering professional seniority in a discipline that was about to explode. I didn’t
even have to maneuver or manipulate. All 1 had to do was stand my ground, and
suddenly I would find myself in the center of the cultural landscape, returning
in triumph to Columbia University, a scholar more prodigal than prodigious.
Even at the time of my most painfully polemical agonies I realized that most
Stanley Kauff m a n n
627
controversies in the intellectual world are determined by the first principle of
Euclidean egometry: Two egos cannot occupy the same position of power at the same
time. It follows that the first inkling that I had acquired a position of power came
when I was attacked by other critics. Ironically, my enemies were the first to
alert me to the fact that I had followers. And with followers came increased re¬
sponsibilities to clarify and develop my position as a critic and historian.
Still, I shall not pretend at this late date that my career as a cultist has fol¬
lowed a preconceived pattern. Nor shall I define the role of the film critic in
self-congratulatory terms applicable only to me. My response to my role as a
critic has generally been intuitive, and nothing is to be gained by institutional¬
izing my intuitions. Every would-be critic must seek his or her own role in terms
of his or her own personality and outlook. I am grateful to film for allowing me
to focus my intellectual insights and world views within a manageable frame. I
believe the subject of film is larger than any one critic or indeed the entire corps
of critics. What follows is my personal view of the films that have helped mold
my consciousness. At this climactic moment of self-revelation all I can do is com -
mend my critical soul to your mercy and understanding.
Stanley Kauffmann
Stanley Kauffmann has been writing film reviews for the New Republic since 1958,
and I have been reading them since about 1962. He is the sanest of critics and the one
most likely to place anyfilm within its wider context of literature, philosophy, art, or pol¬
itics. I read other critics for their insights, their writing, or simply to see what they think;
I don’t much care whether 1 agree with them or not. But when I read Kauffmann, who be¬
came a regular weekly destination for me five years before I wrote my own first reviews,
more is at stake; on important films, if we agree, 1 am gratified, and if we disagree, 1 am
likely to go back to my own review and have another uneasy look at it. It’s not that I as¬
sume he is right and I am wrong; it’s that after Kauffmann disagrees, I wonder if he was
perhaps more right. There is another thing about his work: his economy of expression.
It’s not that his column is particularly short but that he seems able to say more in fewer
words than anyone else.
628
Critics
“Why I’m Not Bored”
The two most frequent questions are: “How many films do you see a week?”
“Don’t you get bored with going to films?” I’ve been writing about them in The
New Republic since 19J8, with one intermission of a year and a half, have heard
each of these questions at least once a week in that time, and am always pleased
by them. As for the first, the number has varied sharply from none to twelve—
usually it’s about three—but the point is that most weeks it wouldn’t have been
less even if I weren’t a critic. (And, grown gray in the ranks, I still get a thrill
out of getting in free.) Once in a great while there have been too many. On
two separate occasions there were two successive days in which I had to see
four films each day—no kind of record but sickening to me. After each of those
pairs of days it was a week before I could see another picture. But most of the
time when I’m asked the question, I can’t really remember how many times
I’ve gone in the previous week or two, it all seems so natural. And therefore
pleasant.
As to the second and more interesting question, the answer is a firm no. A
happy no. To salute the obvious, this doesn’t mean that I never see boring films
or that I am unborable. On the contrary, I’m somewhat more acutely borable—
by reason, I tell myself, of professional acuteness—than most of my friends. But
the idea of going to films is never boring. The former editor of The New Repub¬
lic once generously suggested that I also write about television from time to time.
The prospect of merely crossing the living room to switch on television dramas
was numbing. But even when I have to leave the house to see the most un¬
promising of films (and I limit myself to those with at least some sort of promise),
there is something beyond the specifics of the film that tingles and attracts.
To begin with, there is the elemental kinetic aspect. As with billions of peo¬
ple throughout the world since 1900, the mere physical act of filmgoing is part
of the kinesis of my life—the getting up and going out and the feeling of com¬
ing home, which is a somewhat different homecoming feeling from anything else
except the theater (and which is totally unavailable from television). When I am
not going out, rather frequently, to films (as a New Yorker this is also true for
me of the theater), it’s because I’m ill or sore beset with work or isolated some¬
where in the country. To have my life unpunctuated by the physical act of film¬
going is almost like walking with a limp, out of my natural rhythm.
Past that there is the community, also known to billions, of being in a group
dream, a group reality. This is true of the theater as well, but with films there
is a paradox: because of the greater darkness there is, even in the middle of a
group, the sense of private ownership of the occasion. That ownership has at-
Stanley Ka uJJ m a n n
629
tachments. No one goes to a film theater—or a press screening-room—without
taking with him all of his filmgoing past, including his initial fear. (For years stu¬
dents have been writing papers for me on their recollections of their very first
film experiences, and more often than not, that first experience had included a
feeling of fear.) That fear is never quite lost, perhaps, though gradually it is un¬
derstood, is used to underpin and nourish other responses. No one can go to a
film theater without taking with him his parents and childhood friends and the
first grapplings of romance in the balcony. And no one can sit in a film theater
without acknowledging, however secretly, that this is where some part of his
psyche originated. Messenger boy or mogul, peasant or Pope, there can hardly
be anyone alive whose secret fantasies, controlled and uncontrolled, have not
in some measure been made by film. This has never been so widely true of any
other art. My guess is that it is not yet true of television, may never be true in
quite the same way. The size of the film screen in itself plays a part in its sacer¬
dotal function; it ministers down to us while the television screen paws upward,
smaller than we are, vulnerable to dials and switches. (If films ever really be¬
come principally available through television cassettes, as has been prophesied
sporadically for years, whole psychic orders will have to be redeployed.)
All this exercise and enjoyment before we even touch matters of art, dis¬
crimination, esthetics! Once we get to the question of specific films rather than
generic experience, the specter of boredom raises its threat. Some films turn
out to be just as boring as feared, though not so many as the fulfilled dreads in
the theater and not many more than with new fiction. No one assumes that a
literary critic gets bored, yet, having worked in both kinds of criticism, I know
that the rewards of poor films are more savorable, more certain, than those of
poor novels.
In Westerns, however feeble, there are horses, the creak of leather, the
reach of landscape. In any film there are likely to be attractive women or, if you
prefer, attractive men. For myself, heterosexually straitened though I am, I get
a kick out of seeing O’Toole and Newman and Redford, just as I did with
Cooper and Grant and March. Then there are syntactical rewards. Richard
Lester’s maritime thriller Juggernaut missed the boat, but its editing and pho¬
tography were in themselves thrilling. Visconti’s Ludwig was drear, but the
costumes were sumptuous. The music in Once upon a Time in the West was like a
Puccini sauna. I don’t suggest that anyone go to see those films for those rea¬
sons: I’m just answering the once-a-week question.
There are other, greater things. Direction, for instance. Joseph Sargent, out
of television, has done a really crisp job with The Taking of Pel ham One T wo Three.
I enjoyed the way he used the subway tunnels and the racing through the streets
and the compact arena of the hijacked subway car in a picture that, as a whole,
was fading before it finished. (I couldn’t read the novel.)
630
Critics
And in some dismal pictures one can often find bright spots of acting. A thriller
called 11 Harrowhouse is laden with Charles Grodin and Candice Bergen and a
finale that was apparently devised by a moron on LSD; but James Mason plays
an aging diamond expert, dying of cancer, who revenges himself on his niggardly
employers by collaborating with thieves, and he creates a whole man, quietly,
in the middle of roaring nonsense. Jon Voight has the leading role in a more se¬
riously inane thriller, The Odessa File, and presents the young German journal¬
ist he is supposed to be, even to a beautifully precise accent. (Obeying that
hilarious convention under which Germans in Germany, speaking English to one
another in English-language films, have German accents.)
It would be easy to put together a large bouquet, a garden, several hothouses
of flowers culled from poor pictures. They don’t quite compensate for those
pictures, not even for the waste of themselves in those pictures, still they are
rewards not easily accessible in poor examples of other arts. Theater perfor¬
mances, yes, when they stand out from a bad script and/or a bad company. As
for other matters, although the theater’s symbolic systems are just as “real” as
film’s, they are less intensely packed to the square millimeter, and when one is
forced away from the foreground by tedium, the theater’s supportive symbols
are less varied, less continuingly interesting. Boris Aronson’s beautiful setting
for Company didn’t continue to make up for a dullish evening asTonino delli Colli’s
cinematography almost did for Pasolini’s Decameron.
But that’s enough of scrounging, of beggarly gratitude for edible scraps amidst
the swill. The chief reason for never being bored with the idea of film is that
boredom is incompatible with hope, and hope is more of a constant in film than
in virtually any other art in America. Fiction and poetry and dance and theater
performance (as against playwriting) are in good estate, with good prospects;
but (say the experts I’ve met) this is not true of painting or sculpture or
musical composition or architecture. And no art is more persistently, almost
irritatingly, pulsing with prospects than the film.
Distribution of films is in difficulties, but it always was: only the type of trou¬
ble changes. The vulgar and the violent are more popular than the good; so what
else is new? Nothing rotten that happens in film—and most of what does hap¬
pen is rotten—can negate the fact that it is still an avenue of possibilities, an ex¬
panding nebula of esthetic mysteries, a treasury of aptness for our time.
In 1966 I published an essay called “The Film Generation” that is now some¬
times knocked because the size of the audience has not much increased, has not
returned to anything like the size of the mid-1940s, and, worse, because some
of the best pictures that come along—works by Bresson and Bellocchio, for in¬
stance—have short first-run lives. But I wouldn’t alter much in that essay today.
(Except for one addition: I’ve learned since writing it, by a lot of travel around
the country and through four years’ service on the Theater Panel of the National
Endowment for the Arts, that theater appetite among young people is lesser only
Stanley Ka uff m a n n
63
in size, not in urgency, to film appetite.) The film audience is smaller than it
used to be because, obviously, free movies are available at home, as well as free
vaudeville; but the fact that the film audience has not completely disappeared
in the face of that situation is itself proof of that audience’s vitality. Far from
disappearing, that audience is now increasing. And if the television-threat ar¬
gument were valid, there ought now to be no film theaters at all.
Blacks flocking to cheap “blaxploitation” films, yes. Kung-fu kooks, yes. Hard
and soft porno for hard and soft fans, yes. But if statistics prove that those types
account for a lot, statistics prove other things as well. Somebody is taking those
thousands of film courses in those 1000-plus universities and colleges that offer
them; somebody is buying those film books and magazines that continue to flood
out, attending those festivals that continue to spring up and those film societies
and campus and community series. It’s not quite a nation of Bazins and Agees
as yet, but to argue that the smaller audience has not improved qualitatively is
either a confusion of cynicism with taste or a fear of improvement, a nostalgia
for Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood. The fact that Ozu doesn’t run very long in the
nation’s biggest city doesn’t prove any more about the status of the art and its
audience than the fact that Boesman and Lena didn’t break the Hello, Dolly! record
or that Berryman’s Dream Songs doesn’t outsell Rod McKuen.
Film is in money trouble these days because of inflation, but so is everything,
including book publishing. Relatively, money doesn’t control the making of films
much more than it does the publication of poetry and fiction: if film investments
are higher, so are possible profits. The money squeeze is not new: finance has
always worked cruelly in the film world even when money seemed to be more
free (true of publishing, too), distribution has always been tyrannical, you’ve
always been just as successful as your last picture, the putrid ones have always
seemed to be surging up to our nostrils, and still the good ones have been made
here and abroad—where the difficulties are different only in nomenclature or
proportion—and the lesser ones have had their compensations.
To me this combination of views is hard-headed, with no touch of
Pollyanna—unless there is also a touch of Pollyanna in the human race’s gen¬
eral insistence on survival. Concurrent with our lives runs this muddied, quasi-
strangulated, prostituted art, so life-crammed and responsive and variegated and
embracing, so indefinable no matter how far one strings out phrases like these,
that to deny it seems to me to deny the worst and the best in ourselves, a chance
to help clarify which is which, and which is in the ascendant on any particular
day. No matter how much I know about a film’s makers or its subject before I
go, 1 never really know what it’s going to do to me: depress me with its vile¬
ness, or just roll past, or change my life in some degree, or some combination
of all three, or affect me in some new way that I cannot imagine. So I like being
asked whether filmgoing gets boring: it makes me think of what I don’t know
about the next film I’m going to see.
Critics
632
Quentin Crisp
Quentin Crisp’s autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, describes a lifetime during
which he persisted in presenting himself exactly as he preferred—as a Jlamboyantly ef¬
feminate homosexual—regardless of the consequences. It was his conviction that he was
providing a valuable duty to society. For many years he scraped by in poverty, until the
book brought fame, film and TV roles, speaking tours, and a measure of financial secu¬
rity. Although he was played by John Hurt in the film of his book, Crisp played an even
more characteristic role, Queen Elizabeth 1 , in Orlando [ 1993]. During a stay in New
York, Crisp agreed to writefilm reviews for the gay magazine Christopher Street and
found the experience unsettling.
from How to Go to the Movies
In his wonderful novel The Child Buyer, Mr. Hersey makes an anxious citizen in¬
quire what will happen to the little boy who is being purchased by a vast busi¬
ness concern. The kindly reply is that he will be well treated. Then this disturbing
phrase is added: “Of course, he will have to go into the forgetting chamber.”
For me, this was the story’s moment of true poetry.
At the very end of the book, as he is being led away from his home forever,
the victim asks, “What will happen to my dreams?” This is the question that all
of us might well ask ourselves.
Apparently, it has been scientifically established that to forget real life for a
few hours every night is not enough—that people become more psychotic when
forced to go without their dreams than when deprived of sleep. I seldom
remember my dreams, but I recall every frame of every movie I see and my
fantasy life used to be lived chiefly in the cinema. However, a regular diet of
celluloid is fast becoming difficult to obtain.
In the 1950s, it was prophesied that television would kill the movies; it
Qjj entin Crisp
633
didn’t, but it helped to drive the industry mad. I am not an economist and can¬
not account for what has gone wrong, but, like the rest of the world, I have no
difficulty in seeing that the trend has been away from a steady flow of seldom
first rate but very acceptable pictures to a few productions upon which so much
money has been squandered and on which so many expectations ride that a kind
of financial hysteria has set in. The producers, the actors, and the audiences have
all been led to believe that each new release will be the greatest ever. It is as
though every sexual union between a husband and his wife must be the most
shattering experience ever or the marriage will fail. As Dr. Westheimer would
be the first to point out, it is the accumulated understanding by each partner of
the other’s needs that is the foundation of a successful relationship; and it is the
continuous appreciation of a director’s work or an actress’s performances that
are the deepest joy of moviegoing.
As a child, I was totally absorbed in each picture I saw and so was everybody
I knew. In factories, laundries, kitchens where the faithful were gathered to¬
gether, the conversation was about nothing except the week’s releases. Every
sentence began with the words “Didn’t you love the bit where . . . ?” Between
the years 1926 and 1930, all the women in England looked like Miss Garbo (or
wished they did). Then The Blue Angel burst upon their group consciousness; they
ran home to curl their hair and shave off their eyebrows in order to redraw them
wantonly across their foreheads and look like Miss Dietrich.
In spite of the intensity of her interest, the average movie maniac knew lit¬
tle about the mechanics of filmmaking. Only a highbrow critic would have spo¬
ken of a powerful sequence in Anna Karenina in which, though the count for¬
bade his wife to leave their house, she defied him. The rest would have said,
“. . . and that Basil Rathbone, he shouted at her, but you know our Greta; she
didn’t take a blind bit of notice.” It didn’t matter that in one picture an actress
might be wearing an Empire dress and in the next, a preruined raincoat; each
movie was seen as another day in the life of its star. These great ladies were not
exactly our friends, because friends are people with whom you get stuck; they
were what the word star implies—distant, permanent, dazzling icons who
evoked from us a loyalty and an adoration that only a fool would have lavished
upon a lover or a member of her family.
The cinema—at least the American cinema—was then a phantasmagoric
realm in which feelings ran higher than elsewhere, sentiments were purer,
human beings were capable of greater nobility or degradation, and yet we took
this other world completely for granted, like daylight. Reciprocally, the big film
companies felt equally sure of their audiences. They even gave us serial films of
which each episode ended with the words “Come next week and see another in¬
stallment of this exciting adventure.” Such pictures counted on our fidelity; they
assumed we would never leave our hometown. They fulfilled exactly the same
6 34 Critics
function as the soap operas of modern television, except that now the whole
world is everybody’s hometown.
At that time, movies, some of which are not the subjects of scholarly theses,
were deemed to be entertainment for the masses. My mother did not consider
herself to be a mass, and only accompanied me to the cinema in that spirit of os¬
tentatious condescension with which the British middle classes now treat tele¬
vision. If questioned closely, they say, “Well, yes, we do have a television set
but, of course, we never watch it.”
The early moviemakers were fully aware of the lowliness of their audiences;
they catered to it; they wallowed in it and, accordingly, kept cinema seats well
within the financial reach of almost everybody.
When I lived in London, a woman who occupied the room behind mine
nagged me into consenting to read a book entitled The Children of Sanchez. She
was excruciatingly Russian and wished to rub my powdered nose in the excre¬
ment of the world. This vast tome described in monotonous and squalid detail
the tribulations of one poor Mexican family. In my cotenant’s presence, I opened
the book at random. Immediately, my disdainful gaze fell on the sentence “My
mother went to the movies almost every afternoon.” Thus was confirmed my
conviction that people—especially women—are prepared to make do without
the barest necessities but not without the cinema.
This law does not only prevail in Mexico. By the time I was as adult as I am
ever likely to be, there were three movie “circuits” in Britain. They were the
Odeon, the Gaumont, and the A.B.C. Throughout the length and breadth of
the land, in throbbing cities, in smug towns, in marooned villages, each of these
cinema chains exhibited a different double feature every week of the year, come
rain or come shine, as Miss Garland would have said. This meant that with a lit¬
tle luck, a lot of ingenuity, and a total disregard for domestic duties, it was pos¬
sible for everyone to spend three and a half hours on three nights a week away
from the inclement world. Almost all the films shown in those days were Amer¬
ican, until a “quota” system came into force, which compelled each cinema
manager to foist upon his clientele a certain number of English pictures as part
of their weekly fare of illusion. As Mr. Korda says in his fascinating book about
his famous uncle, Charmed Lives: “when this law came into effect the British pub¬
lic went mad as though it had been asked to do without bread.” This extreme
reaction was due not only to the self-evident inferiority of the home product;
it was also occasioned by the fact that to the British, British films did not con¬
stitute a visit to the forgetting chamber; they were as boring as life in England
really is. Serious crime, which is the staple diet of scriptwriters, seemed to be
a daily occurrence in Chicago and New York but was almost unknown in Man¬
chester or Wigan. There, if he played his cards right, a murderer could stay on
the frontpage of the Daily Telegraph for weeks. Who wants art to reflect his own
humdrum existence?
Q^u entin Crisp
635
The years of the double feature were the happiest days of their lives not only
for audiences; they were also the golden age of actresses.
Today, when people speak of the seven-year contract, they do so with curled
lips. Now that everyone thinks he has rights, that arrangement is considered to
have been too heavily loaded in favor of the employer. It has become yet an¬
other area in which the unions have raised their ugly heads; but, as Miss Kerr
has pointed out, in fact it provided a stable atmosphere in which an actress could
perfect her skills with at least some assurance that they would be used. Her stu¬
dio would carry her through at least one flop, and by the time her contract was
well under way, she had usually acquired her own secretary, her own makeup
artist—in some cases, her own cameraman. (Mr. Daniels photographed almost
all of Miss Garbo’s movies.) In other words, a leading lady became a kind of
queen bee attended by five or six drones who had no other function than to en¬
hance her assets and conceal her defects. No wonder so many of them became
permanent stars. What keeps a woman young and beautiful is not repeated
surgery but perpetual praise. They were the eternal mistresses of their public.
In def erence to the art directors of their films, they changed their costumes oc¬
casionally, but only as ballerinas wear tights and tutus to remind us thatthey are
first and foremost classical dancers but, if spoken to nicely, will don a turban to
show that for the moment they are the playthings of cruel Turks. A movie star
never deprived her public of the thrill of instant recognition at her first appear¬
ance on the screen.
This happy predictability no longer prevails. Now, every new picture is a des¬
perate gamble, deafeningly publicized, with its mounting costs broadcast like
news of a forest fire. If a film fails, even though its star may have been judged
by the critics to have been the only good thing in it, when her name is mentioned,
some movie mogul will growl, “Isn’tthatthebroad that cost us thirty-four mil¬
lion dollars?” In these circumstances, actresses have decided to be different peo¬
ple in different roles; they have taken to acting—a desperate measure indeed.
Though television has wrought all this havoc in Hollywood, it is no real sub¬
stitute for the movies. It has its star; it has Miss Collins, who remains through
all vicissitudes of plot the last of the “vamps.” If she ever appeared on any screen,
large or small, as a nice home girl, the world would come to an abrupt and ig¬
nominious end. In general, however, the effect of television upon our lives has
been pernicious. Big was beautiful. Television diminishes the scale of our fan¬
tasies, but it does worse than that; it domesticates them. It does not compel us
to give it our whole attention. We can sip our instant decaffeinated coffee while
being thrown out of the fortieth-floor windows of an expensive hotel; we can
file our nails while being raped by hooded intruders. We see television on our
own mundane turf. It is as injurious to the soul as fast food is to the body.
We should vacate our homes and go to a movie for the very reason that this
exodus will force us to take the occasion seriously, to abandon everyday life, to
636
Critics
place ourselves for a while where there are fewer distractions, where the tele¬
phone bell cannot toll for us. We ought to visit a cinema as we would go to
church. Those of us who wait for films to be made available for television are
as deeply under suspicion as lost souls who claim to be religious but who boast
that they never go to church. As Mr. Godard has said, such people are as wholly
to be condemned as the Philistines who say they are art lovers but who never
step inside a gallery, preferring instead merely to buy picture postcards of fa¬
mous paintings.
The way to go to the movies is incessantly. The more often we visit the cin¬
ema, the more exciting the experience becomes, not the more boring, as one
might have expected. Films teach us how to see them; they are written in a lan¬
guage that we must leam. If, some fifty years ago, the average audience had been
shown a film as complicated as Charade or Arabesque, it would have tottered out
into the light of day completely bewildered. Now, in a carefully constructed,
well-told movie, we can perceive and interpret the slightest tremor of the cam¬
era, the most fleeting glance of an actor. We must go to the movies so often
that, while remaining distant, the stars become calculable to us, allowing us to
recognize and dote upon their gestures, the tones of their voices, their every
idiosyncrasy. After a while, even the unseen presence of our favorite directors
will become traceable.
The way to go to the movies is reverently. We must be prepared to believe
in the most improbable hypothesis, provided that it is presented to us with suf¬
ficient conviction, enough passion. We must surrender our whole beings to
whatever reaction the story demands—gasping, laughing, weeping, wincing,
sighing with utter abandonment. Thus we shall be spared the appalling likeli¬
hood of giving way to indecorous emotion in real life. Audiences who consider
themselves sophisticated do not always understand this. When Last Tango in Paris
was first shown in London, journalists, their microphones erect, lurked outside
the cinema like rapists, waiting to pounce upon the female members of the clien¬
tele. “What did you think of it?” they inquired. “We liked it,” the girls replied
somewhat nonplussed. Never known for their delicacy in such matters, the re¬
porters then asked, “What did you think of the sexy bits?” To this onslaught on
their maidenly modesty, the girls then answered, “Oh, we just laughed”—not,
you will note, “we laughed” but“we just laughed,” meaning that they felt no more
involving emotion. Why? If we are prepared—nay, eager—to be shot by Mr.
Robinson or to be driven at breakneck speed through busy narrow streets by
Mr. McQueen, why do we not long to be defiled by Mr. Brando? This thin-lipped
response is typically English and must be cured.
The way to go to the movies is critically. That is to say, we must take to each
cinema two pairs of spectacles. While we plunge into each picture as though it
were happening to us, we must also watch it from a distance, judging it as a work
Qjj en t i n Crisp
637
of art. Thus, to seeing a film will be added an extra pleasure that can never be
derived from real life, which has no plot and is so badly acted. This dual vision
is especially beneficial when watching a movie made in a different era. In these
productions, their old-fashioned clothes and morality render them superficially
ludicrous, but their quaintness must not blind us to the skill with which they
have been made.
If we go to the movies often enough and in a sufficiently reverent spirit, they
will become more absorbing than the outer world, and the problems of reality
will cease to burden us.
This is the state of affairs toward which so many of us unsuccessfully strive.
Opium is the religion of the people, or it was until very recently when cocaine
came back into fashion, but we are told by heaps of teenagers that the ecstasies
of crack only last about a quarter of an hour—hardly as long as a travelogue or
an animated cartoon. A first feature lasts eight times as long. No toxic substance
is a real answer. Comrade Dostoyevsky said that without tobacco and alcohol,
life for most men would be intolerable, but he had never been to a double fea¬
ture. It is true that movies are as addictive as dope, but they are far less injuri¬
ous to health and they ought not to be as expensive.
Clearly, the salvation of the Western world is in the hands of the film indus-
try.
In order that the poorest among us may once again goto the movies several
times a week, someone must find a way to lower the price of cinema seats. The
unions must be crushed and there must be a return to the making of low-budget
pictures so as to provide us with longer programs.
The world is pining for a steady diet of celluloid; it desperately needs an al¬
ternative lif e to that through which it drags itself at the office or, worse, at home.
This other existence need not be prettier, but it must be richer; it must have
the power to use those capacities for love and courage for which we can find no
worthy object in real life.
Forme,itwasinmiddle age that mundane activities claimed s o much o f my
time. For my own sake and for the sake of other people’s survival, I tried to take
part in real life. In old age, as in childhood, I have been lucky; I have felt less
need to keep my feet on the ground; I have begun to float into other realms.
For some people, this higher plane is mysticism or reincarnation or worse; for
me, it has been the cinema.
For the chance to indulge this passion, I have to thank Christopher Street mag¬
azine and especially its editor, Mr. Steele. I would like to think that the reviews
in this book show that, even when I have found fault with some particular film,
I have enjoyed watching it. I also hope that I have been able to impart to my read¬
ers a little of the pleasure that I have experienced in the forgetting chamber.
Technique
Nestor. Almendfeos
In this article, written for John Boorman’s Projections magazine, the gifted Cuban cin¬
ematographer Nestor Almendros (1930—1992) writes lovingly of the great screen beau¬
ties he has photographed—and then, not missing a beat, reveals every secret he can think
of about the lighting, camera angles, makeup secrets, and even hair removal that con¬
tributed to their images. The result is one of the most objective discussions I’ve come across
about why a few people look like movie stars and most do not.
“Matters of Photogenics”
Throughout my career I have been privileged to photograph some of the most
beautiful and interesting women in the world, in many countries, on two con¬
tinents. Photographing actresses past their prime represents something of a
problem for the cinematographer, who is forced to use diffusion filters in front
of the lens to diminish the wrinkles (though in reality they don’t hide much),
but I have filmed most of these women at the best time of their lives. Isabelle
Adjani, for example, was almost an adolescent in The Story of Adele H. Her al¬
abaster complexion had a marvellous transparency. Meryl Streep, whom I have
filmed several times, is another actress with a wonderful face, whose skin has
an almost marble-like quality.
I have also photographed mature stars like Catherine Deneuve, who, like good
wine, has improved with the passage of time. Looking now at one of Ms.
Deneuve’s first pictures, it is clear that when she was very young she was only
a pretty girl, not the sensational beauty she is now. Without a doubt, the years
have been kind, giving her style and class, turning her into a real goddess. There
is a kind of woman who is at her best between the ages of thirty and forty. When
I filmed her in The Last Metro, she was at the height of her beauty.
Photographing Simone Signoret in Madame Rosa, at the end of her life and ca-
641
642
Technique
reer, I did not have to worry about covering wrinkles, or hiding her age, since
the role did not require it. On the contrary, she had to be made to look older.
This great actress took the procedure in her stride and asked that wrinkles be
added to her make-up, so as to give the impression of an elderly and defeated
woman. Simone Signoret was once very beautiful. Who could forget her in
Casque d’Or or Dedee d’Anvers?
More recently, I have had the privilege of photographing that new French ac¬
tress, the tall and beautiful Fanny Ardant. I was fortunate to film her in black
and white, which is especially good for portraits. When taking close-ups in a
colour picture, there is too much visual information in the background, which
tends to draw attention away from the face. That is why the faces of the actresses
in the old black and white pictures are so vividly remembered. Even now,
movie fans nostalgically recall Dietrich . . . Garbo . . . Lamarr . . . Why?
Filmed in black and white, those figures looked as if they were lit from within.
When a face appeared on the screen over-exposed—the high-key technique,
which also erased imperfections—it was as if a bright object was emerging from
the screen.
But today we almost always have to work in colour. This makes good fea¬
tures even more important. I photographed Brooke Shields in The Blue Lagoon,
when she was very young. She was only fourteen years old, really a child, al¬
though she portrayed a sixteen-year-old. Her face comes close to absolute per¬
fection. But surface beauty is not everything. We could say that Sally Fields is a
woman whose beauty comes from within. In Places in the Heart, she played a
provincial woman, and her modesty was most appropriate for the role. She
wanted to appear almost without make-up, dressed in well-worn clothes, as a
simple American country woman—something which has its own beauty.
At the time of writing, I am in the midst of shooting a film, Nadine, directed
by Robert Benton, with one of the most attractive young stars of the new Amer¬
ican cinema, Kim Basinger. Kim’s career has just started, but she is making her
presence felt. Both her face and her figure are perfect—it is rare for one per¬
son to have both. Her face is completely symmetrical, which is quite unique.
Her perfection might even seem excessive, almost as inhuman as a mannequin’s,
a problem sometimes experienced by models (which Ms. Basinger once was).
However, she is also an excellent actress, with a fiery look, and that saves her.
In Nadine, which is set in the 19 jos, the dresses are of bright solid colours, and
the lipstick and nail polish are of a violent red, which was the fashion at that time.
This was a challenge for me, and I can’t predict how well the photography will
turnout, because it is the first time I have been faced with such a range of colours.
It is impossible to say which is the most beautiful of all these women, because
each in her own way is extraordinary: Deneuve, as a great lady, is splendid, a
classic beauty for all times; personifying the freshness of youth, Brooke Shields
Nestor Almendros
643
is unique; Meryl Streep, whose face looks as if it has been sculpted by Brancusi,
is the most expressive and intelligent. But there is something common to all of
them, something that makes them photograph well. The truth is that the cam¬
era lenses love some women more than others. Themystery of being photogenic
has to do with bones. A person who “has no bones” is very difficult to light. The
great beauties of the screen such as Garbo, Crawford and Mangano all have a
we 11 -structured face. The nose was sufficient and well defined, not a cute little
one; they had high cheekbones, well-drawn eyebrows, splendid jaws. A good
bone structure in the face gives the light something to hold on to and allows it
to create an interplay of shadows. If the face is flat, the light has nowhere to fall.
Of course, the eyes are very important, and I believe that dark-haired peo¬
ple with light-coloured eyes have a great advantage in the movies, because of
the effect of contrasts on the face. Blondes with very light eyes are difficult to
photograph, because there is a certain visual monotony. It is not by chance that
Gene Tierney and Hedy Lamarr, two women with dark hair and very light eyes,
were such a sensation on the screen. This asymmetry might also be said to apply
to Deneuve, who is a blonde with dark eyes—an eye-catching contrast.
Most of these beautiful starshave had a fair complexion, without any tan. The
problem with suntan is that it makes the skin appear monochrome on the screen.
A face which has notbeen excessively exposed to the sun will have rosy cheeks,
white forehead and natural red lips; different shades of the skin will show
through. With a bronzed complexion, however, it all comes together and ap¬
pears uniform. In any case the woman with a suntan has been over-exploited by
commercial advertising, to the point where it has become rather a vulgar image.
Yet until the 1920s women used umbrellas as protection against the sun. It is
true that sometimes an actor’s role requires bronzed skin, yet having a tan has
often become an obsession to the extent of defying all logic. Male actors today
are especially inclined to fall victim to the suntan craze. Roy Scheider, an ex¬
cellent actor, always has a tan because he believes it is becoming. But when we
were filming Still of the Night, in which he portrayed a New York psychiatrist,
that suntan was not appropriate to the role. Robert Benton, the director, and I
had to insist that he stop sunbathing at weekends. The same thing happened with
Jack Nicholson in Heartburn.
Certain movie stars, international celebrities, turnout to be, in person, less
interesting than you expected, and can even seem unattractive. Is there a secret
to that improved image we see on the screen? I believe that the lens captures
their inner personality. Thanks to the close-up, the camera almost acts as a mi¬
croscope, revealing their hidden beauty.
But one should remember that even the most beautiful person in the world
has some defects. The important thing is to pinpoint such flaws and try to min¬
imize them, so that they will not show on the screen. For example, a very young
644 Technique
actress (I shan’t name her) whom I had to photograph had overgrown gums.
When she laughed or smiled, they were revealed in their abundance, giving her
an almost horsy look. I became aware of this before the filming started, so I in¬
formed the director, and the actress, since a good actress is always ready to co¬
operate with the director of photography. Our job is similar to a doctor’s, who
diagnoses an illness and prescribes a remedy. We spot the defects and must do
our best to hide them. In fact, most actresses are aware of their flaws, because
they know themselves well, and are grateful to us for helping them hide such
imperfections. Consequently, once they know we know, they put themselves
in our hands with confidence and let us guide them. In this case, we advised the
actress not to laugh or smile openly during the film, but merely to smile with
her eyes, Mona Lisa style. Having followed these suggestions, she appeared in¬
credibly beautiful on film, and in no time at all was a star.
There are other ways of hiding imperfections. One is by use of corrective
make-up, a technique that is not that well known to lay people. For example,
an actress with whom I worked some years ago had a very low and narrow hair¬
line, which reduced her forehead, unbalancing the face and making her jaw look
very prominent. I suggested lifting the hairline about an inch by means of hair
removal. This procedure had been undergone many years before by Rita Hay¬
worth, who had a similar problem .Her image was changed with the hair-lift and
from a third-rate starlet she became the “sex symbol” of the age. Another ex¬
ample of camouflage through make-up, lights and angles is Marlene Dietrich.
When she started in the movies she had a rather round face, like a German peas¬
ant’s. It is said that when she moved to Hollywood she asked her dentist to ex¬
tract some molars; this operation served to emphasize her cheekbones. She also
lost weight, as she had been asked to do. One should compare the German film
The Blue Angel of 1930 with The Shangai Express, filmed in America two years later.
Another method of hiding an actress’s flaws is to photograph only her best an¬
gles. Some people have one profile which is better than the other; that is to say,
their faces are uneven, one side quite different from the other, or the nose is
not straight. If this is the case, the photographer should place the main light op¬
posite the side towards which the nose leans, making it look straight.
But let’s go back to Marlene Dietrich, who knew herself so well. Marlene
thought, not without reason, that her profile was inferior to the frontal view of
her face, that she had a duck nose. In love scenes, which show the profiles of the
man and woman looking at each other, she always managed to face the camera,
and always with a light placed in such a way as to emphasize her famous cheek¬
bones. Since the man was in profile and she was facing the camera, she had to
look at him sideways, something that later became Marlene’s trademark in the
movies. This sideways glance developed into her famous femmejatale look. This
is how Dietrich, very intelligently, turned a defect into an advantage. Perhaps
Nestor Almendros
von Sternberg was instrumental in this. Another strategy well known by men
and women in the movies, especially older ones, is to smile. A smile stretches
the skin and so thus lifts the face. This is why many actors and actresses smile
all the time at the cameras, even where the scene calls for no such thing.
In some cases what might be considered a flaw turns out to be an advantage.
Richard Gere’s eyes are quite small. I realized this right away when looking
through my view-finder, during the filming of Days of Heaven. But I decided that,
far from being a drawback, they gave him a certain animal look, penetrating and
alive, that has become part of his sex appeal and has contributed to his success.
Actors with enviably big eyes often project a beefy, boring and expressionless
look, a false beauty.
It is true that the movies make people look taller than they really are. The
explanation is very simple: it is because of the enlargement of dimensions as the
film is projected on to the screen. Since comparisons cannot easily be made,
everyone looks the same height. But if the leading man happens to be shorter
than his partner, we raise him on a platform to add some inches; on the whole,
feet don’t show, so there is no problem. Perceived height is also linked with per¬
sonality: stars with a strong personality seem taller. When I filmed my second
picture with Meryl Streep, as usual there was a stand-in for the actress. Stand-
ins should be at least the same height and should project a similar general de¬
meanour, to facilitate our work in lining up the shots in the actors’ absence. I
began to think that Meryl’s stand-in was shorter than the actress, yet after mea¬
suring her we found that she was in fact slightly taller.
It is often said that people look slightly heavier on the screen, but I believe
that the notion that the camera adds i o pounds is an exaggeration. I have no doubt
that in order to be photogenic an actress doesn’t have to be thin. The diet craze
is misconceived. Women of yesteryear, with their curvy shapes, had a very spe¬
cial beauty. The advertising media have done much to promote this modem pre¬
occupation with being almost emaciated, an image which is now all but played
out. In the movie Witness, Kelly McGillis is a slightly plump woman by movie
standards. When she appears in the nude, she looks attractively like the Venus
de Milo. I believe that women should have curves. But that does not mean I ap¬
prove of the present tendency towards developing muscles.
Any worthwhile director of photography will work closely with the hairstylist,
costume designer and make-up expert to create that elusive image of the woman
whose beauty is admired by all. In any film with a substantial budget, tests are
made for the hairstyles, wardrobe and make-up. During pre-production all pos¬
sibilities are explored; tests are filmed, shown in a projection room, discussed
and submitted to the director and producer for approval. The tests include, of
course, variations of lighting. One might find out then, for example, that an ac¬
tress who has a rather round face should never have both sides of her face lighted
Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel (1930)
Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel
648 Technique
with the same intensity, since this will make it seem wider. We will illuminate
half of the face and leave the other side in semi-darkness. We might discover
too, if a person has a longish face, that lighting one side only will accentuate the
length; so a frontal light will have to be used. We will see that, if the actor or
actress has deep-set eyes, the lights should be placed low, because if they are
high the shadow of the eyebrows will not let the eyes show. This was the case
with an exceptional French actor, Jean-Pierre Leaud, with whom I have filmed
four pictures. Lit properly, his eyes were his greatest asset.
One of the actresses with whom I have worked had a gorgeous face and a mar¬
vellous torso and arms, but the lower part of her body was not too well shaped.
The strategy was to dress her in long, dark skirts that covered her legs, and to
avoid showing her body full length. Obviously, these decisions should be taken
after the tests are made. It should be stressed that in our efforts to beautify the
actresses, there is no magic, no mystery—just common sense and hard work.
As director of photography I have to walk away from what a woman wants
us to believe and, instead, analyse her just as she is. Many women have person¬
alities which make men think they are beautiful, without actually being so. In
my profession I have to be totally objective, going to great lengths, when I am
working, to become an asexual human being, analysing people in a dispassion¬
ate manner. Very often the director, full of enthusiasm for an actor or actress,
is not aware of their physical shortcomings. It is my job to point them out so
that something can be done to help minimize these flaws. I am paid to do this,
not just to light a scene.
There is a law which may be applied to nature, as well as to the movies, and
it is that no woman’s face can stand the light that comes from high above. That
is why in the tropics many girls of marriageable age would go out only in the
late afternoon, when the sun is low and the light has a warmer tone and is less
harsh, which improves their looks. The midday light forms a shadow under the
eyes, which clouds the look, and another under the nose, giving the impression
of a moustache. In movie sets, as well as at home, a light that comes from the
top should illuminate a plant or a painting, never a face. The most flattering lights
are those from lamps set at the sides—lights that are not harsh, but soft, dif¬
fused. That is why the invention of the lampshade was so important! The spot¬
lights or track lights thatbecame fashionable in the 1960s are a disaster, because
they emphasize all the flaws on the skin. Another classic trick is that used by the
character of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire: low-key lighting to cam¬
ouflage imperfections. Also effective is the use of warm-coloured lampshades
like rose or amber. This unifies and hides sun blemishes and ageing and may be
used in real life as well as in cinema. Candlelight is very flattering too, a fact
well-known even by decorators of second-rate restaurants and nightclubs.
Which actresses from the past do I wish I could have photographed? In first
Robert Bench Iey 649
place is the great Marlene Dietrich. After her I would place Louise Brooks, Hedy
Lamarr, Ava Gardner, Maria Felix, Gene Tierney, Joan Crawford, Silvana
Mangano, Danielle Darieux, Alida Valli and Dolores del Rio. Unfortunately,
when I started working in the movies, these exquisite actresses were on their
way out.
R.OBER.T BENCHLEY
The movie magazines today feature monthly columns collecting anachronisms and conti¬
nuity errors: Look how Sean Connery’s top button is open in the close-up but closed in the
over-the-shoulder shot and how when Michael Caine climbs out of the water, his shirt is
dry! This genre, if such it is, was satirized before it was invented, by Robert Benchley
(1889—1945), a humorist whose own short subjects (The Treasurer’s Report, The
Sex Life of the NewtJ werefavorites of audiences in the 1930s and 1940s.
“Movie Boners”
One of the most popular pastimes among movie fans is picking out mistakes in
the details of a picture. It is a good game, because it takes your mind off the pic¬
ture.
For example (Fr. par example) in the picture called “One Night Alone—for a
Change,” the Prince enters the door of the poolroom in the full regalia of an of¬
ficer in the Hussars. As we pick him up coming in the door, in the next shot, he
has on chaps and a sombrero. Somewhere on the threshold he must have changed.
This is just sheer carelessness on the part of the director.
In “We Need a New Title for This,” we have seen Jim, when he came to the
farm, fall in love with Elsie, although what Elsie does not know is that Jim is re¬
ally a character from another picture. The old Squire, however, knows all about
6 jo
Technique
it and is holding it over Jim, threatening to expose him and have him sent back
to the other picture, which is an independent, costing only a hundred thousand
dollars.
Now, when Jim tells Elsie that he loves her (and, before this, we have already
been told that Elsie has been in New York, working as secretary to a chorus girl
who was just about to get the star’s part on the opening night) he says that he is
a full-blooded Indian, because he knows that Elsie likes Indians. So far, so good.
But in a later sequence, when they strike oil in Elsie’s father (in a previous
shot we have seen Elsie’s father and have learned that he has given an option on
himself to a big oil company which is competing with the old Squire, but what
the old Squire does not know is that his house is afire) and when Elsie comes to
Jim to tell him that she can’t marry him, the clock in the sitting room says ten-
thirty. When she leaves it says ten-twenty. That would make her interview minus
ten minutes long.
In “Throw Me Away!” the street car conductor is seen haggling with the Morelli
gang over the disposition of the body of Artie (“Muskrat”) Weeler. In the next
shot we see Artie haggling with the street-car conductor over the disposition of
the bodies of the Morelli gang. This is sloppy cutting.
In “Dr. Tanner Can’t Eat” there is a scene laid in Budapest. There is no such
place as Budapest.
What the general public does not know is that these mistakes in detail come
from the practice of “block-booking” in the moving picture industry. In “block¬
booking” a girl, known as the “script-girl,” holds the book of the picture and is
supposed to check up, at the beginning of each “take” (or “baby-broad”), to see
that the actors are the same ones as those in the previous “take.”
The confusion comes when the “script-girl” goes out to lunch and goes back
to the wrong “set.” Thus, we might have one scene in The Little Minister where
everybody was dressed in the costumes of The Scarlet Empress, only The Little Min¬
ister and The Scarlet Empress were made on different “lots” and at different times.
It might happen, even at that.
Joe B o n o m o
i
Joe Bonomo
Not a year goes by without a story of a stuntman or woman killed or critically injured on
afilm set. Ifind the stories so sad: the earful preparations, the anticipation of success,
the stunt person striding off with bravado, and then a miscalculation and death. "You al¬
ways hold your breath for a moment after the stunt, ’’an actress said after an accident she
witnessed, ‘because the stuntwoman doesn ’t move until the director says 'cut. ’ Then she
jumps up and waves, and everybody claps. But when she didn’t jump up, there was a ter¬
rible silence.’’ Thefollowing description of an early stunt gone wrong is from a rare and
curious book, The Strongman, by a stuntman, muscleman, and sometime B movie star
named Joe Bonomo, who published it himself in 1968. What is evocative is that Bonomo
doesn’t boast about his own stunts (he performed hundreds) but writes about one he had
a feeling wouldn ’t work: "I’ll never forget that look in his eyes. It seemed to tell me he
knew that I was right. ’’
from The Strongman
In one picture there was a sequence in which a stuntman was to double for the
hero when he changed from an airplane to a speeding freight train. Now, 1 had
already done so much of that kind of work that the director naturally chose me
for the job. It didn’t sound especially difficult when we talked about it, and I
agreed to do it. Just another stunt, I thought.
However, the next morning, when we were all on location, that warning
voice inside me told me not to go up. I didn’t like the flyer who was to pilot the
plane. Somehow, I didn’t have confidence in him. The regular pilots that we
usually worked with were nowhere around, and believe me, the life of a stunt¬
man depends so much on the skill of his pilot in this sort of stunt. So I told the
director I wouldn’t do the stunt unless Al Wilson—another of the Black Cats—
piloted the plane. Al was the pilot I usually worked with, and I was sure he knew
6f2
Technique
his job. Al, incidentally, was the last of the Cats to go—killed in 1933 stunting
at an air carnival. But he was a heck of a good man and we were close friends.
On this particular day, Al was working another job. I was sorry, I said, but I just
didn’t like the looks of the guy who was to pilot for this stunt.
The director became angry, and refused to change pilots, muttering some¬
thing about “temperamental stuntmen with no guts.” He insisted that this pilot
was thoroughly competent.
“What’s the matter with you, Bonomo,” he said. “Running out of gas?” (This
was a common movie expression for losing your nerve.)
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But maybe that’s it. You do the stunt if you want to, and
I’ll direct the cameras.”
This other stuntman (I’ll just call him “Lefty” here) was a close friend of mine.
We had worked together, on and off, for several years. He was a specialist in
this kind of stunt, too. When it came to coolness under fire, and courage at all
times, well, Lefty had no master. A great guy.
After about an hour, Lefty arrived, and the director told him what had hap¬
pened. I was standing some distance away, and I couldn’t hear what they were
saying, but the director occasionally glanced at me with scorn. Pretty soon Lefty
nodded his head and grinned, and I knew he had agreed to do the stunt. The di¬
rector went back to his camera crew, and I approached Lefty. He was getting
into his belts and other straps, the natural protection all stuntmen wear.
“You going up, huh?” I said.
“Sure, Joe. Why not?”
What could I tell him? I had no logical reason why not. Just a feeling. “I’ve
just got a bum hunch about this pilot,” I said.
“What’s he got to do? Just fly the plane, that’s all,” he replied.
“Lefty,” I said, “Don’t go up.”
I’ll never forget that look in his eyes. It seemed to tell me that he knew I was
right. It’s a funny thing, but he understood the way I felt. Since the fight with
the director I had been left alone on the lot like I had leprosy. But here was a
guy who understood. He seemed to hesitate a moment, but then he broke out
in his usual grin, tightening his protective chest belt.
“What the hell, it’s a job,” he laughed. “I’ll see ya later.” He jabbed me play¬
fully in the gut and walked off to talk to the pilot.
They took off a few minutes later and the train was started way down to the
left, coming up toward us. The thing was to be timed so thatthe transfer to the
train happened just in front of us. The plane circled as the train picked up speed.
Instead of overtaking and settling down on the train from the rear, can you imag¬
ine our horror on the ground when this pilot who was supposed to be so com¬
petent, approached the train from the side! There was no radio in the plane; our
only communication with the plane was by hand signals. And the dummy in the
Joe Bo n o m o
6 J 3
cockpit probably had all he could do to fly the plane, probably didn’t even look
down.
There was nothing we could do but wave at him, and that having no effect,
stand by and watch the tragedy. Lefty was down at the end of the rope ladder.
The plane was coming in too low, and at right angles to the train. At the last
minute, we saw Lefty try to climb back up the ladder. He managed to get back
up a few rungs on the swaying, free-hanging ladder, but it was not enough. The
plane, doing probably seventy miles an hour, slapped him up against the side of
the moving freight train, dragged and bounced him over the top, and he was
lost to view on the other side.
When the train had passed, we could see the plane rise a little, with Lefty
still hanging on to the ladder. We were all screaming our lungs out, trying to
wave the pilot off, but he misunderstood the signal, I guess, and thought the di¬
rector wanted another try.
By this time the train was some distance down the track, and we saw the ap¬
proach from sort of behind. The plane approached again, and again too low.
Lefty, battered and probably broken in a dozen places, couldn’t climb up and
he couldn’t let go to fall to the ground. It was probably only on sheer guts that
he hung on at all. We all stood looking with a helpless sick feeling, as into the
side of the train he was swung again, bounced and dragged over the top again.
He hung on for maybe fifty yards on the other side, then slipped off the ladder
and fell to the ground. He hit and bounced almost as high as the low-flying plane,
then hit again, rolled a few more yards, and lay there.
When we reached him, Lefty was still conscious. Instead of blaming the stu¬
pidity of the pilot, he apologized to the director for ruining the picture.
“I’m sorry I missed, Bill,” were the last words he said. He became uncon¬
scious, and about a minute later he died, almost every bone in his body sticking
out through his flesh in jagged splinters. The first of the Black Cats had been
kissed.
The pilot responsible for this boy’s death didn’t do any more work in films,
you can bet on that. The plane had circled the scene of the accident a couple of
times, and the pilot must have looked down and seen what had happened. He
wasn’t too bright, but I’m sure he must have known whose fault it was, because
the plane just flew away. The guy never even showed up to collect his pay.
6^4 Technique
Janet Leigh
I once shared a ski lift with Janet Leigh at the Telluride Film Festival. We hung high in
the air, utterly alone, for twenty minutes, and our conversation was inhibited by my un¬
certainty: I was a journalist, and she was a star, so should there be small talk or an in¬
terview? I was determined not to be so banal as to bring up the shower scene in Psycho,
which is not only her most famous scene but high on the list of anyone’s favorite scenes,
but somehow it did come up, and she laughed and said she has been asked so many times
about so many of the details of the scene that she thought she had become, almost out of
self-protection, one of the leading experts on it. A few years later she published a book
that proved her point. She leaves out, however (perhaps because it is apocryphal), the fa¬
mous story about Hitchcock’s receiving a letter from a man who complains that after Di-
abolique his daughter was afraid to take a bath and now, after Psycho, was afraid to
take a shower. "What should 1 do with her?’’ he asked, and Hitchcock replied: “Send her
to the dry cleaners. ”
from Behind the Scenes of “Psycho”
The Shower
The bathroom scenes were scheduled to be shot December 17 through De¬
cember 23, 1959. It’s ironic when you think of it: During the day I was in the
throes of being stabbed to death, and at night I was wrapping presents from Santa
Claus for the children. And hubby. And family. And friends. Christmas was al¬
ways a big celebration for me; the spirit of the holiday itself meant so much.
When I was a younggirl in Stockton, California, and we didn’thave very much,
it was a festive occasion nonetheless. The choirs I belonged to in church and
school would go all over the city singing Christmas carols for different groups
and clubs. We usually traveled to Merced, California, to visit Grandma and
Janet Leigh
6 J 5
Grandpa Morrison. And I still joyfully anticipated whatever little gifts we could
scrape together. So finally, when I was earning a good living, I was able to re¬
ally make a point of going all out for everybody.
Evening was the time for me to be the wife as well as the mother, the two
identities that have always had priority over everything else in my life. As I
worked on Psycho, my husband, Tony Curtis, was making Rat Race with our friend
Debbie Reynolds. So, between the two of us, there was always a great deal to
discuss at dinner. Aside from comparing notes about our respective films, we
were concerned about Debbie, who had been through a difficult time the year
before with her divorce from Eddie Fisher. The public only sees the actor’s
screen persona and rarely understands what a toll personal tragedies can take
on a creative individual.
Fortunately, Mr. Hitchcock did not like to work late. Some directors never
seemed to want to go home and kept slave hours. But not Hitch!
Hilton Green: "Our crew, cowing from television, was used to a shorter shooting schedule,
doing wore setups in a day. Mr. Hitchcock never wanted to work past six r.M. And he had
one standing engagement: Every Thursday, Mr. Hitchcock and madawe would have a quiet
dinner at Chosen's. So on Thursdays we finished even earlier than usual.”
As Christmas approached, the question consuming me during the day was:
what to wear in the shower? Rita Riggs and I pored over magazines that showed
wardrobe suggestions for strippers. Every guy on the set was eager to look and
give his opinion on what would work. The pictures were entertaining—we all
laughed for hours—but hardly practical. There was an impressive display of pin-
wheels, feathers, sequins, toy propellers, balloons, etc., but nothing suitable for
our needs. Rita solved the puzzle. Nude-colored moleskin! Over the vital parts!
Perfect!
Neither of us ever thought about negative consequences. But there were a few. Water had
the tendency to mel t the adhesi ve.for one. Plus wearing the moleskin for any length of time
made my skin raw when we peeled it off. So we would remove it between shots to give my
skin some relif, which, of course, was time-consuming.
Before the actual filming began, Mr. Hitchcock showed me the storyboards,
drawn for the shower montage by the brilliant artist Saul Bass, who also did the
titles for the movie. There were anywhere from seventy-one to seventy-eight
angles planned for the series, each one lasting for two to three seconds on the
screen. But whether an image appeared on screen for two seconds or two min¬
utes or twenty minutes, it took just as long to prepare for a camera setup; the
groundwork was the same.
656 Technique
Years later, at the American Film Institute tribute to Mr. Hitchcock, Ton/ and 1 presented
one segment. In the dialogue prepared by George Stevens, Jr., who is meticulous in his re¬
search, it is said there were seventy-one setups; however, in another book on Psycho, it
was stated there were seventy-eight. In all the interviews Chris and 1 conductedfor this book
and in all the searching we did at Universal, Paramount, and the Academy, we found no
verification of the exact number. Therefore the number remains vague to this day.
The shower sequence was the exception to Hitchcock’s attitude toward film
editing. This next series of shots depended on the cutting to startle and terrify,
which is why he was so careful about following the storyboard. The word “cut¬
ting” is appropriate here, because the quick flashes were meant to be indicative
of the continuous slashing, plunging knife.
Now is an appropriate time to address another popular question:
Did Saul Bass direct the shower scene, as he claims?
This is an easy one—a d finite “absolutely not!" 1 have emphatically said this in any in¬
terview I've ever given. I've said it to hisface in front of other people. For thelifef me, I
cannot understand what possessed Saul Bass to make that statement. He is a celebrated de¬
signer of titles, a three-time Academy A ward nominee as a producer of animated shortfilms,
and soforth and so on. Why would he say that? Why would he need to do that? Mr. Hitch¬
cock and everyone else associated with Psycho acknowledged Mr. Bassfor his contributions.
The movie credits read: Titles Designed by Saul Bass, Pictorial Consultant—Saul Bass.
I was in that shower for seven days, and, believe you me, Alfred Hitchcock was right
next to his camerafor every one of those seventy-odd shots.
Lillian Burns Sidney gave me some prudent advice after the succesful release of myfirst
film. The studio was buzzing about its newest star. "Onefilm does not a star make,”she
told me. “Come back in twenty years, then maybe you’ll be a star." 1 never forgot it. Now
1 have some advice for Mr. Bass: “Drawing some pictures does not a director make."
I am not the only one who has been incensed by Bass's assertion. Joseph Stfano and
Rita Riggs have voiced their dismay at Mr. Bass's claims as well. And listen to Hilton.
Hilton Green: “Saul might have visited the set, but I don't recall him there that much,
maybe a half day in all. There is not a shot in that movie that I didn’t roll the camera for.
And I can tell you 1 never rolled the camerafor Mr. Bass.
“1 have been quoted bfore, and you can quote me again, because lam very outspoken
on this matter. ”
1 hope this puts that rumor to bed once and for all.
For Marion, going into the shower was more than just a need to wash away
the day’s grime. Hitch and I discussed the implications at great length. Marion
had decided to go back to Phoenix, come clean, and take the consequences, so
when she stepped into the tub it was as if she were stepping into the baptismal
Janet Leigh bgj
waters. The spray beating down on her was purifying the corruption from her
mind, purging the evil from her soul. She was like a virgin again, tranquil, at
peace.
If I could convey this to the audience, the attack would become even more
horrifying and appalling.
The seven days in the water were trying for everyone. There were many re¬
peats of the same action, taken from different angles. Then there were the de¬
lays due to moleskin problems or camera technicalities. We were fortunate that
the cast and crew were patient and had a sense of humor, because these cir¬
cumstances could have caused some flare-ups.
By the way, contrary to what is said on the Psycho tour at Universal Studios, Mr. Hitch¬
cock did not turn on the cold water to get a shocked reaction from me when Mother came
in. I was able to do that all by myself, thank you very much. In fact, he was adamant about
the water temperature being very comfortable.
Security was a constant source of trouble. Even though I wore the moleskin,
I was still pretty much ... on display, so to speak. I didn’t want strangers lurk¬
ing around, hoping to get a peek in case of any accidental mishap. If anything
did slip up, at least only my friends would get a look.
Hitch didn’t want extra people around either—for my sake, of course, but
also I’m sure to keep the hype going about what was really happening on that
crazy set!
When I was in the tub looking up toward the showerhead, I was surprised at
how many gaffers (electricians) were on the overhead scaffolding. I hadn’t seen
that many technicians up there even during elaborate scenes on the huge stages,
let alone for one person in a tiny bathroom. And each one must have had two
or three “assistants.” I have a hunch they worked dirt cheap on those days.
One of the toughest shots in the entire film—for me anyway—was at the end
of the murder scene. The camera started on a close-up of the dead eye, then
gradually pulled back to include more and more of the tub, the shower, the bath¬
room, until it was very high (as from a bird’s-eye view? A stuffed bird’s-eye
view?).
As I mentioned earlier, I could not wear the special contact lenses the scene
seemed to require and “going it alone” was not easy. I would blink involuntar¬
ily, or swallow, or breathe. On my slide down the tiled wall and collapse over
the edge, I had landed in the most awkward position—my mouth and nose were
squished against the side of the tub. And drops from the splashing water settled
upon my eyelashes and brows and face, and they tickled. It was a formidable
task not to react.
The camera didn’t have the automatic focus in 19^9, so the operator had to
658 Technique
do it manually, changing it as the camera moved. Very demanding. So—again
the exception to the Hitchcock rule—there were many takes on this shot. Some¬
where in the twenties—Hilton Green and I both agreed between twenty-two
and twenty-six. Everyone was keeping their fingers crossed. We were almost
near the end and nothing had gone wrong. Hallelujah!
Atthat moment (thanks to Hitch’s compassionate insistence on warm water).
I could feel the damn moleskin pulling away from my left breast. I knew the lens
would not pick it up—that part was below the top of the tub. But I also knew
the guys in the balcony would get an eyeful. By that time, I was sore where I
was pressed against the ungiving porcelain—my body ached—and I didn’t want
to shoot this again if we didn’t have to. So I decided not to say anything—the
hell with it, I said to myself; let ’em look!
Time to deal with another question:
Did Hitchcock try to persuade you to be nude in the shower?
Mr. Hitchcock never asked me to do the scene nude. 1 would like to explain something at
this point. This book was intended to set the record straight about Psycho by sharing un¬
known stories, incidents, and memories. So when we reread most of what has been written
and said about Psycho, and spoke with so many of the actual participants, we felt even
more compelled to correct the blatant inaccuracies and lingering tall tales.
There would have been no point in Hitch suggesting that 1 play the scene nude, because
the industry operated under the scrutiny of a censor's office. Every script andfinished prod¬
uct had to be approved by this board. And nudity was not allowed to be shown. And you
know what else? Doing the scene nude would have cheated Hitch and millions of moviefans,
because all would have missed his mastery of insinuating situations and conditions.
If you had looked at the storyboard, you would have noticed that there was no need to
see the whole body nude: One angle would show an arm here, a tummy there, shoulders
down to the great divide, legs, back.
(T he back—one of the sexiest parts of the body. For a scene in The V ikings, Kirk Dou¬
glas ripped my gown down the back, exposing the whole length of skin to the lowest hol¬
low. He has always believed the back is a real turn-on.)
Joseph Stfano cleared up a couple of other points. Mr. Hitchcock did not say to him,
“I’m going to have a problem with Janet; she thinks her breasts are too big!" (I would have
had to be pretty stupid to worry about my boobs being too big. Actually I often say, “Thank
you, God.”)
Stfano also told me about another erroneously printed statement: “I never said any¬
thing to anyone about a trembling actress.”(This rffers to a remark Hitchcock allegedly
made to Stfano about the possibility of me appearing nude in the shower: "I don't want
to deal with a trembling actress.')
Another question:
Were you really in the shower?
Janet Leigh
6 f 9
I am amazed that 1 am still asked that question. Y ou look at that sequence closely and you
see — me! Unquestionably, without a doubt, unequivocally, 1 was in that showerfor seven
drenching days. 1 was in that shower so much that my skin was beginning to look like a
wrinkled prune.
Every player has a stand-in. And on most dangerous stunts, the movie's insurance cov¬
erage insists on stunt doubles as well. Although sometimes weJudge a bit and do more of
the stunts than we really should—it can befun! (Of course, you have to be a mite zany to
think that way. But we all have some of that daredevil craziness in us.)
On Psycho, Mr. Hitchcock hired a body double, a professional artist's model who was
accustomed to being nude, it being all in a day's work. Her name was Marli Renfro, and
she was paid $400 a week, one week guaranteed. He used Ms. Renfro to see how much of
the body outline the camera would pick up behind the shower curtain, and to test the den¬
sity of the water—what level of waterforce would read well and yet not obscure Marion.
But she was not on camera during the shower scene.
At the end of the murder, Norman wrapped the corpse in the shower curtain and dragged
it out to the car. That was the only shot I was not in. Hitch showed me that no one could
see who it was, so there was no needfor me to be bounced around. I totally agreed.
However, my naughty friend Mr. Hitchcock did try to slip one shot by the inspectors.
Joseph Stefano: "He [Hitchcock] knew he would never get away with frontal nudity,
but he thought he might squeak by with a high overhead shot of Marion lying over the tub.
For this shot he used the model. But her buttocks were seen. The incredible thing was that
the scene right before this one was when he went to your [Janet’s] eye and it was heart¬
breaking. There was no sex connected to it at all. There was this beautful person whom I
had cared about all through the movie up to this point, and she was lying there dead. But
no deal. It was the only angle from the shower sequence that was cut."
The day they werefilming that long shot, John Gavin had quite an awakening.
John Gavin: "1 had rooms at the studio [Universal]; 1 used one as an office. I noticed
on the call sheet that the shower montage was still being shot, so 1 came by to say hello.
[He didn't realize I, Janet, was finished with my part.] The sign read Closed Set, and 1
thought, ‘Well, it’s not closed to me, 1 belong to this company.' So I opened the door and
went in. And indeed, no one said a boo. 1 walked around and all of a sudden I noticed this
girl just wandering about absolutely stark naked. My eyes almostfell out of my head, like
a great lout. But no one else was paying any attention to her; I guess they had become quite
used to her. ”
Every person we spoke with who had been involved with the movie was dumbfounded
that anyone could think it wasn’t me in the shower. But once people got wind that there
was a nude model on the set at all, it wasfireworksfor trivia.
You know what 1 think? 1 think Hitch deliberately hired the model partly to plant the
seed in people's minds that this picture had nudity. He had started to manipulate the au¬
diences before the film was even in a theater. He teased the pros, the nonpros, the sophis¬
ticated, and the naive. He knew the rumor would eventually become the gospel truth. The
seed would blossom to such an extent that when the viewers came out of the movie houses,
they would swear on the Bible that they had seen nudity. And gushing blood. And weapon
penetration. Such was Alfred Hitchcock's gift.
66 o
Technique
Mark O’Donnell
1 have always vaguely grasped that the laws of physics in cartoons, while different from
those proposed by Newton, have a consistency of their own. Mark O'Donnell is the New¬
ton of the art form.
“The Laws of Cartoon Motion”
(1) . Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of
its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loi¬
ters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this
point, the familiar principle of thirty-two feet per second per second takes over.
(2) . Any body in motion will tend to remain in motion until solid matter in¬
tervenes suddenly. Whether shot from a cannon or in hot pursuit on foot, car¬
toon characters are so absolute in their momentum that only a telephone pole
or an outsize boulder retards their forward motion absolutely. Sir Isaac New¬
ton called this sudden termination of motion the stooge’s surcease.
(3) . Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation con¬
forming to its perimeter. Also called the silhouette of passage, this phenome¬
non is the specialty of victims of directed-pressure explosions and of reckless
cowards who are so eager to escape that they exit directly through the wall of
a house, leaving a cookie-cutout-perfect hole. The threat of skunks or matri¬
mony often catalyzes this reaction.
(4) . The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is greater than or
equal to the time it takes for whoever knocked it off the ledge to spiral down
twenty flights to attempt to capture it unbroken. Such an object is inevitably
priceless, the attempt to capture it inevitably unsuccessful.
(j). All principles of gravity are negated by fear. Psychic forces are sufficient
in most bodies for a shock to propel them directly away from the earth’s sur-
Akira Kurosawa
66
face. A spooky noise or an adversary’s signature sound will induce motion up¬
ward, usually to the cradle of a chandelier, a treetop, or the crest of a flagpole.
The feet of a character who is running or the wheels of a speeding auto need
never touch the ground, especially when in flight.
(6). As speed increases, objects can be in several places at once. This is par¬
ticularly true of tooth-and-claw fights, in which a character’s head may be
glimpsed emerging from the cloud of altercation at several places simultaneously.
This effect is common as well among bodies that are spinning or being throt¬
tled. A “wacky” character has the option of self-replication only at manic high
speeds and may ricochet off walls to achieve the velocity required.
(7.) Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel
entrances; others cannot. This trompe l’oeil inconsistency has baffled genera¬
tions, but at least it is known that whoever paints an entrance on a wall’s sur¬
face to trick an opponent will be unable to pursue him into this theoretical space.
The painter is flattened against the wall when he attempts to follow into the paint¬
ing. This is ultimately a problem of art, not of science.
(8) . Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent. Cartoon cats
possess even more deaths than the traditional nine lives might comfortably af¬
ford . They can be decimated, spliced, splayed, accordion-pleated, spindled, or
disassembled, but they cannot be destroyed. After a few moments of blinking
self pity, they reinflate, elongate, snap back, or solidify. Corollary: A cat will
assume the shape of its container.
(9) . For every vengeance there is an equal and opposite revengeance. This is
the one law of animated cartoon motion that also applies to the physical world
at large. For that reason, we need the relief of watching it happen to a duck in¬
stead.
Akir.a Kurosawa
Great directors are notoriously shy about revealing or discussing their methods, often pre¬
ferring, like Hitchcock, to use indirection or, like John Ford, to claim that they are sim¬
ply doing a job of work and have no notions of any larger meaning. In Japan it is not
quite the same because the idea of artistic individualism has not been, until recently, part
662
Technique
of the artist’s idea of himselj. Instead artists in many media deliberately built upon the
work of their predecessors, continuing within the same tradition and then passing on their
methods to the next generation. There is something of that feeling in these notes by Kuro¬
sawa; they were written as advice to young filmmakers and read as if they were written by
a man who has learned his craft, knows it, and has confidence that he can pass it on.
from Something Like an Autobiography
Some Random Notes on Filmmaking
What is cinema? The answer to this question is no easy matter. Long ago the
Japanese novelist Shiga Naoya presented an essay written by his grandchild as
one of the most remarkable prose pieces of his time. He had it published in a
literary magazine. It was entitled “My Dog,” and ran as follows: “My dog re¬
sembles a bear; he also resembles a badger; he also resembles a fox. . . .” It pro¬
ceeded to enumerate the dog’s special characteristics, comparing each one to
yet another animal, developing into a full list of the animal kingdom. However,
the essay closed with, “But since he’s a dog, he most resembles a dog.”
I remember bursting out laughing when I read this essay, but it makes a se¬
rious point. Cinema resembles so many other arts. If cinema has very literary
characteristics, it also has theatrical qualities, a philosophical side, attributes of
painting and sculpture and musical elements. But cinema is, in the final analy¬
sis, cinema.
There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be ex¬
pressed in a film, and it must be present in a film for that film to be a moving
work. When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particularly deep emo¬
tion while watching that film. I believe it is this quality that draws people to come
and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the
filmmaker to make his film in the first place. In other words, I believe that the
essence of the cinema lies in cinematic beauty.
When I begin to consider a film project, I always have in mind a number of ideas
that feel as if they would be the sort of thing I’d like to film. From among these
one will suddenly germinate and begin to sprout; this will be the one I grasp and
develop. I have never taken on a project offered to me by a producer or a pro-
Akira Kurosawa
663
duction company. My films emerge from my own desire to say a particular thing
at a particular time. The root of any film project for me is this inner need to ex¬
press something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the
script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.
The role of director encompasses the coaching of the actors, the cinematogra¬
phy, the sound recording, the art direction, the music, the editing and the
dubbing and sound-mixing. Although these can be thought of as separate occu¬
pations, I do not regard them as independent. 1 see them all melting together
under the heading of direction.
A film director has to convince a great number of people to follow him and work
with him. I often say, although I am certainly not a militarist, that if you com¬
pare the production unit to an army, the script is the battle flag and the direc¬
tor is the commander of the front line. From the moment production begins to
the moment it ends, there is no telling what will happen. The director must be
able to respond to any situation, and he must have the leadership ability to make
the whole unit go along with his responses.
Although the continuity for a film is all worked out in advance, that sequence
may not necessarily be the most interesting way to shoot the picture. Things can
happen without warning that produce a startling effect. When these can be in¬
corporated in the film without upsetting the balance, the whole becomes much
more interesting. This process is similar to that of a pot being fired in a kiln.
Ashes and other particles can fall onto the melted glaze during the firing and cause
unpredictable but beautiful results. Similarly unplanned but interesting effects
arise in the course of directing a movie, so I call them “kiln changes.”
With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece; with the same
script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even
a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression,
the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. That
is what makes a real movie. The script must be something that has the power to
do this.
A good structure for a screenplay is that of the symphony, with its three or four
movements and differing tempos. Or one can use the Noh play with its three-
664 Technique
part structure: jo (introduction), ha (destruction) and kyu (haste). If you devote
yourself fully to Noh and gain something good from this, it will emerge natu¬
rally in your films. The Noh is a truly unique art form that exists nowhere else
in the world. I think the Kabuki, which imitates it, is a sterile flower. But in a
screenplay, I think the symphonic structure is the easiest for people of today to
understand.
In order to write scripts, you must first study the great novels and dramas of the
world. You must consider why they are great. Where does the emotion come
from that you feel as you read them? Whatdegree of passion did the author have
to have, what level of meticulousness did he have to command, in order to por¬
tray the characters and events as he did? You must read thoroughly, to the point
where you can grasp all these things. You must also see the great films. You must
read the great screenplays and study the film theories of the great directors. If
your goal is to become a film director, you must master screenwriting.
I’ve forgotten who it was that said creation is memory. My own experiences
and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis
upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this
reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy
when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves
me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to
write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with
a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from
these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down
in bed.
I began writing scripts with two other people around 1940. Up until then I wrote
alone, and found that I had no difficulties. But in writing alone there is a danger
that your interpretation of another human being will suffer from one-sidedness.
If you write with two other people about that human being, you get at least three
different viewpoints on him, and you can discuss the points on which you dis¬
agree. Also, the director has a natural tendency to nudge the hero and the plot
along into a pattern that is the easiest one for him to direct. By writing with about
two other people, you can avoid this danger also.
Something that you should take particular notice of is the fact that the best scripts
have very few explanatory passages. Adding explanation to the descriptive pas-
Akira Kurosawa
6 6 £
sages of a screenplay is the most dangerous trap you can fall into. It’s easy to ex¬
plain the psychological state of a character at a particular moment, but it’s very
difficult to describe it through the delicate nuances of action and dialogue. Yet
it is not impossible. A great deal about this can be learned from the study of the
great plays, and I believe the “hard-boiled” detective novels can also be very in¬
structive.
I begin rehearsals in the actors’ dressing room. First 1 have them repeat their
lines, and gradually proceed to the movements. But this is done with costumes
and makeup on from the beginning; then we repeat everything on the set. The
thoroughness of these rehearsals makes the actual shooting time very short. We
don’t rehearse just the actors, but every part of every scene—the camera move¬
ments, the lighting, everything.
The worst thing an actor can do is show his awareness of the camera. Often when
an actor hears the call “Roll ’em” he will tense up, alter his sight lines and pre¬
sent himself very unnaturally. This self-consciousness shows very clearly to the
camera’s eye. I always say, “Just talk to the actor playing opposite. This isn’t
like the stage, where you have to speak your lines to the audience. There’s no
need to look at the camera.” But when he knows where the camera is, the actor
invariably, without knowing it, turns one-third to halfway in its direction. With
multiple moving cameras, however, the actor has no time to figure out which
one is shooting him.
During the shooting of a scene the director’s eye has to catch even the minut¬
est detail. But this does not mean glaring concentratedly at the set. While the
cameras are rolling, I rarely look directly at the actors, but focus my gaze some¬
where else. By doing this 1 sense instantly when something isn’t right. Watch¬
ing something does not mean fixing your gaze on it, but being aware of it in a
natural way. 1 believe this is what the medieval Noh playwright and theorist
Zeami meant by “watching with a detached gaze.”
Many people choose to follow the actors’ movements with a zoom lens. Although
the most natural way to approach the actor with the camera is to move it at the
same speed he moves, many people wait until he stops moving and then zoom
in on him. I think this is very wrong. The camera should follow the actor as he
moves; it should stop when he stops. If this rule is not followed, the audience
will become conscious of the camera.
666
Technique
Much is often made of the fact that I use more than one camera to shoot a scene.
This began when I was making Seven Samurai, because it was impossible to
predict exactly what would happen in the scene where the bandits attack the
peasants’ village in a heavy rainstorm. If I had filmed it in the traditional shot-
by-shot method, there was no guarantee that any action could be repeated in
exactly the same way twice. So I used three cameras rolling simultaneously. The
result was extremely effective, so I decided to exploit this technique fully in less
action-filled drama as well, and I next used it for Ikimono no kiroku ( Record of a
Living Being). By the time I made The Lower Depths I was using largely a one-shot-
per-scene method.
Working with three cameras simultaneously is not so easy as it may sound. It is
extremely difficult to determine how to move them. For example, if a scene
has three actors in it, all three are talking and moving about freely and naturally.
In order to show how the A, B and C cameras move to cover this action, even
complete picture continuity is insufficient. Nor can the average camera opera¬
tor understand a diagram of the camera movements. I think in Japan the only
cinematographers who can are Nakai Asakazu and Saito Takao. The three cam¬
era positions are completely different for the beginning and end of each shot,
and they go through several transformations in between. As a general system, I
put the A camera in the most orthodox positions, use the B camera for quick,
decisive shots and the C camera as a kind of guerilla unit.
The task of the lighting technicians is an extremely creative one. A really good
lighting man has his own plan, though he of course still needs to discuss it with
the cameraman and the director. But if he does not put forth his own concept,
his job becomes nothing more than lighting up the whole frame. I think, for ex¬
ample, that the current method of lighting for color film is wrong. In order to
bring out the colors, the entire frame is flooded with light. I always say the light¬
ing should be treated as it is for black-and-white film, whether the colors are
strong or not, so that the shadows come out right.
I am often accused ofbeing too exacting with sets and properties, of having things
made, just for the sake of authenticity, that will never appear on camera. Even
if I don’t request this, my crew does it for me anyway. The first Japanese di¬
rector to demand authentic sets and props was Mizoguchi Kenji, and the sets in
Akira Kurosawa
667
his films are truly superb. I learned a great deal about filmmaking from him, and
the making of sets is among the most important. The quality of the set influ¬
ences the quality of the actors’ performances. If the plan of a house and the de¬
sign of the rooms are done properly, the actors can move about in them
naturally. If I have to tell an actor, “Don’t think about where this room is in re¬
lation to the rest of the house,” that natural ease cannot be achieved. For this
reason, I have the sets made exactly like the real thing. It restricts the shooting,
but encourages that feeling of authenticity.
From the moment I begin directing a film, I am thinking about not only the music
but the sound effects as well. Even before the camera rolls, along with all the
other things I consider, I decide what kind of sound I want. In some of my films,
such as Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, I use different theme music for each main char¬
acter or for different groups of characters.
I changed my thinking about musical accompaniment from the time Hayasaka
Fumio began working with me as composer of my film scores. Up until that time
film music was nothing more than accompaniment—for a sad scene there was
always sad music. This is the way most people use music, and it is ineffective.
But from Drunken Angel onward, I have used light music for some key sad scenes,
and my way of using music has differed from the norm—I don’t put it in where
most people do. Working with Hayasaka, I began to think in terms of the coun¬
terpoint of sound and image as opposed to the union of sound and image.
The most important requirement for editing is objectivity. No matter how
much difficulty you had in obtaining a particular shot, the audience will never
know. If it is not interesting, it simply isn’t interesting. You may have been full
of enthusiasm during the filming of a particular shot, but if that enthusiasm
doesn’t show on the screen, you must be objective enough to cut it.
Editing is truly interesting work. When the rushes come up, I rarely show them
to my crew exactly as they are. Instead I go to the editing room when shooting
is over that day and with the editor spend about three hours editing the rushes
together. Only then do I show them to the crew. It is necessary to show them
this edited footage for the sake of arousing their interest. Sometimes they don’t
understand what it is they are filming, or why they had to spend ten days to get
a particular shot. When they see the edited footage with the results of their labor,
668
Technique
they become enthusiastic again. And by editing as I go along, I have only the fine
cut to complete when the shooting is finished.
I am often asked why I don’t pass on to young people what I have accomplished
over the years. Actually, I would like very much to do so. Ninety-nine percent
of those who worked as my assistant directors have now become directors in
their own right. But I don’t think any of them took the trouble to learn the most
important things.
David Mamet
Many directors may have thought it, but David Mamet is one of the few brave directors
to say it: "Most actors are, unfortunately, not good actors. ” His prescriptionfor good act¬
ing is typical of the Chicago School also espoused by the Steppenwolf actors: No theory,
no thinking, just prepare yourself, and do it. "The acting should be a performance of the
simple physical action. Period.”Mamet's greatest success has come as a playwright and
screenwriter, but for me his films are a bracing experience because they contain so much
rigor and intelligence. House of Games in particular is an unfolding Chinese box of
plot, character, and motivation. And look what he does to the crime genre in Homicide.
He wrote On Directing Film after having directed only two of them, but that helps the
book, 1 think, because he was still fresh, still aware of theory, and what he was doing had
not yet become habit.
from On Directing Film
What to Tell the Actors and Where to Put the
Camera
I’ve seen directors do as many as sixty takes of a shot. Now, any director who’s
watched dailies knows that after the third or fourth take he can’t remember the
David Mamet
669
first; and on the set, when shooting the tenth take, you can’t remember the pur¬
pose of the scene. And after shooting the twelfth, you can’t remember why you
were born. Why do directors, then, shoot this many takes? Because they don’t
know what they want to take a picture of. And they’re frightened. If you don’t
know what you want, how do you know when you’re done? If you know what
you want, shoot it and sit down. Suppose you are directing the “get a retrac¬
tion” movie. What are you going to tell the actor who does that first beat for
you? What do we refer to; what is our compass here? What is a simple tool to
which we may refer to answer this question?
To give direction to the actor, you do the same thing you do when you give
direction to the cameraman. You refer to the objective of the scene, which in this
case is to get a retraction; and to the meaning of this beat, which here is to arrive
early.
Based on this, you tell the actor to do those things, and only those things, he
needs to do for you to shoot the beat, to arrive early. You tell him to go to the
door, try the door, and sit down. That is literally what you tell him. Nothing
more.
Just as the shot doesn’t have to be inflected, the acting doesn’t have to be in¬
flected, nor should it be. The acting should be a performance of the simple phys¬
ical action. Period. Go to the door, try the door, sit down. He doesn’t have to
walk down the hall respectfully. This is the greatest lesson anyone can ever teach
you about acting. Perform the physical motions called for by the script as sim¬
ply as possible. Do not “help the play along.”
He doesn’t have to sit down respectfully. He doesn’t have to turn the door
respectfully. The script is doing that work. The more the actor tries to make
each physical action carry the meaning of the “scene” or the “play, ” the more that
actor is ruining your movie. The nail doesn’t have to look like a house; it is not
a house. It is a nail. If the house is going to stand, the nail must do the work of
a nail. To do the work of the nail, it has to look like a nail.
The more the actor is giving him or herself over to the specific uninflected
physical action, the better off your movie is, which is why we like those old-
time movie stars so much. They were awfully damn simple. “What do I do in
this scene?” was their question. Walk down the hall. How? Fairly quickly. Fairly
slowly. Determinedly. Listen to those simple adverbs—the choice of actions and
adverbs constitutes the craft of directing actors.
What’s the scene? To get a retraction. What’s the meaning of the beat? To ar¬
rive early. What are the specific shots? Guy walking down the hall, guy tries the
doorknob, guy sits down. Good luck will be the residue of good design. When
the actor says, “how do I walk down the hall?” you say, “I don’t know . . .
quickly.” Why do you say that? Because your subconscious is working on the
problem. Because you’ve paid your dues at this point and you’re entitled to make
what may seem to be an arbitrary decision but may also be a subconscious so-
670
Technique
lution to a problem; and you have honored the subconscious by ref erring the
problem to it long enough for it to cough up the answer.
Just as it’s in the nature of the audience to want to help the story along, to
help along good work, that is to say work which is respectful of its inner nature,
just so it’s in the nature of your subconscious to want to help this task along. A
lot of decisions that you think are going to be made arbitrarily are arrived at
through the simple and dedicated workings of your subconscious. When you look
back at them, you will say, “well, I got lucky there, didn’t I?” and the answer
will be “yes” because you paid for it. You paid for that subconscious help when
you agonized over the structure of the film. The shot list.
Actors will ask you a lot of questions. “What am I thinking here?” “What’s
my motivation?” “Where did I just come from?” The answer to all of these ques¬
tions is it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because you can’t act on those things.
I defy anyone to act where he just came from. If you can’t act on it, why think
about it? Instead, your best bet is to ask the actor to do his simple physical ac¬
tions as simply as possible.
“Please walk down the hall, try the doorknob.” You don’t have to say “try
the doorknob and it’s locked.” Just try the doorknob and sit down. Movies are
made out of very simple ideas. The good actor will perform each small piece as
completely and as simply as possible.
Most actors are, unfortunately, not good actors. There are many reasons for
this, the prime reason being that theater has fallen apart in our lifetime. When
I was young, most actors, by the time they got to be thirty, had spent ten years
on the stage, earning their living.
Actors don’t do that anymore, so they never get a chance to learn how to act
well. Virtually all of our actors in this country are badly trained. They’re trained
to take responsibility for the scene, to be emotional, to use each role to audi¬
tion for the next. To make each small and precious moment on the stage or
screen both “mean” the whole play and display their wares, to act, in effect, “sit
down because I’m the king of France.” It’s not that actors are dumb people. To
the contrary, the job, in my experience, attracts folk of high intelligence, and
most of them are dedicated people; bad actors and good actors are in the main
dedicated and hardworking people. Unfortunately, most actors don’t accom¬
plish much, because they’re badly trained, underemployed, and anxious both
to advance their career and to “do good.”
Also, most actors try to use their intellectuality to portray the idea of the
movie. Well, that’s not their job. Their job is to accomplish, beat by beat, as sim¬
ply as possible, the specific action set out for them by the script and the direc¬
tor.
The purpose of rehearsal is to tell the actors exactly the actions called for, beat
by beat.
David Mamet
671
When you get on the set, the good actors who took careful notes will show
up, do those actions—not emote, not discover, but do what they’re getting paid
to do, which is to perform, as simply as possible, exactly the thing they rehearsed.
If you, the director, understand the theory of montage, you don’t have to
strive to bring the actors to a real or pretended state of frenzy or love or hate
or anything emotional. It’s not the actor’s job to be emotional—it is the actor’s
job to be direct.
Acting and dialogue fall into the same boat. Just as with the acting, the pur¬
pose of the dialogue is not to pick up the slack in the shot list. The purpose of
dialogue is not to carry information about the “character.” The only reason peo¬
ple speak is to get what they want. In film or on the street, people who describe
themselves to you are lying. Here is the difference: In the bad film, the fellow
says, “hello, Jack, I’m coming over to your home this evening because I need to
get the money you borrowed from me.” In the good film, he says, “where the
hell were you yesterday?”
You don’t have to narrate with the dialogue any more than you have to nar¬
rate with the pictures or the acting. The less you narrate, the more the audience
is going to say, “wow. What the heck is happening here? What the heck is going
to happen next . . . ?” Now, if you’re telling the story with the pictures, then
the dialogue is the sprinkles on top of the ice cream cone. It’s a gloss on what’s
happening. The story is being carried by the shots. Basically, the perfect movie
doesn’t have any dialogue. So you should always be striving to make a silent
movie. If you don’t, what will happen to you is the same thing that happened
to the American film industry. Instead of writing the shot list, you’ll have the
student rise and say, “isn’t that Mr. Smith? I think I’ll get a retraction from him.”
Which is what happened to American films when sound came in, and they’ve
gotten worse ever since.
If you can learn to tell a story, to break down a movie according to the shots
and tell the story according to the theory of montage, then the dialogue, if it’s
good, will make the movie somewhat better; and if it’s bad, will make the
movie somewhat worse; but you’ll still be telling the story with the shots, and
they can take the brilliant dialogue out, if need be—as, in fact, they do when a
film is subtitled or dubbed—and a great film, so treated, is injured hardly at all.
Now that we know what to tell the actors, we need an answer to the one
question the crew will ask you again and again—“where do we put the camera?”
The answer to this question is, “over there.”
There are some directors who are visual masters—who bring to moviemak¬
ing a great visual acuity, a brilliant visual sense. I am not one of those people.
So the answer I’m giving is the only answer I know. I happen to know a certain
amount about the construction of a script, so that’s what I’m telling you. The
question is, “where do I put the camera?” That’s the simple question, and the
672
Technique
answer is, “over there in that place in which it will capture the uninflected shot
necessary to move the story along.”
“Yes, but,” a lot of you are saying, “I know that the shot should be uninflected,
but really since it’s a scene about respect shouldn’t we put the camera at a re¬
spectful angle?”
No; there is no such thing as “a respectful angle.” Even if there were, you
wouldn’t want to put the camera there—if you did so, you wouldn’t be letting
the story evolve. It’s like saying: “a naked man is walking down the street copu¬
lating with a whore while going to a whorehouse.” Let him get to the whore¬
house. Let each shot stand by itself. The answer to the question “where do you
put the camera?” is the question “what’s the shot of?”
That’s my philosophy. I don’t know better. If I knew a better answer to it, I
would give it to you. If I knew a better answer to the shot, I would give it to
you, but because I don’t, I have to go back to step number one, which is “keep
it simple, stupid, and don’t violate those rules that you do know. If you don’t
know which rule applies, just don’t muck up the more general rules.”
I know it’s a shot of a guy walking down a hall. I’m going to put the camera
somewhere. Is one place better than another? Probably. Do I know which place is
better than another? No? Then I’ll let my subconscious pick one, and put the
camera there.
Is there a better answer to the question? There may be, and the better an¬
swer may be this: in the storyboard for a movie or a scene, you may see a cer¬
tain pattern developing, which might tell you something. Perhaps your task as
a designer of shots is, after a point, that of a “decorator,” quite frankly.
“What are the ‘qualities’ of the shot?” I don’t happen to think that’s the most
important question in making a movie. I think it’s an important question, but I
don’t think it’s the most important question. When faced with the necessity of
a particular election, I’m going to answer what I think is the most important ques¬
tion first, and then reason backward and answer the smaller question as best I
can.
Where do you put the camera? We did our first movie and we had a bunch
of shots with a hall here and a door there and a staircase there.
“Wouldn’t it be nice,” one might say, “if we could get this hall here, really
around the corner from that door there; or to get that door here to really be the
door that opens on the staircase to that door there?" So we could just move the
camera from one to the next?
It took me a great deal of effort and still takes me a great deal and will con¬
tinue to take me a great deal of effort to answer the question thusly: no, not
only is it not important to have those objects literally contiguous; it is impor¬
tant to fight against this desire, because fighting it reinforces an understanding
of the essential nature of film, which is that it is made of disparate shots, cut to-
David Mamet
673
gether. It’s a door, it’s a hall, it’s a blah-blah. Put the camera “there” and photo¬
graph, as simply as possible, that object. If we don’t understand that we both can
and must cut the shots together, we are sneakily falling victim to the mistaken
theory of the Steadicam. It might be nice to have these objects next to each other
so as to avoid having to move the crew, but you don’t get any sneaky artistic
good out of literally having them next to each other. You can cut the shots together.
This relates to what I said about acting: if you can cut different pieces,
different scenes together, different lines together, you don’t have to have some¬
body in every shot with the same “continuous intention.” The same “commit¬
ment to and understanding of the character.” You don’t need it.
The actor has to be performing a simple physical action for the space of ten
seconds. It does not have to be part of the “performance of the film.” Actors talk
about the “arc of the film” or the “arc of the performance.” It doesn’t exist on
stage. It’s not there. The performance takes care of both. The “arc of the per¬
formance,” the act of controlling, of doling out emotion here and withholding
emotion there, just doesn’t exist. It’s like a passenger sticking his arms out of
the airplane window and flapping them to make the plane more aerodynamic.
This commitment to the arc of the film—it’s ignorance on the part of the actor,
ignorance of the essential nature of acting in film, which is that the performance
will be created by the juxtaposition of simple, for the most part uninflected shots,
and simple, uninflected physical actions.
The way to shoot the car crash is not to stick a guy in the middle of the street
and run over him and keep the camera on. The way to shoot the car crash is to
shoot the pedestrian walking across the street, shoot the shot of the onlooker
whose head turns, shoot the shot of a man inside the car who looks up, shoot
the shot of the guy’s foot coming down on the brake pedal, and shoot the shot
underneath the car with the set of legs lying at a strange angle (with thanks to
Pudovkin, for the above). Cut them together, and the audience gets the idea:
accident.
If that’s the nature of film for the director, that’s the nature of film for the
actor too. Great actors understand this.
Humphrey Bogart told this story: When they were shooting Casablanca and
S. Z. (Cuddles) Sakall or someone comes to him and says, “they want to play
the ‘Marseillaise,’ what should we do?—the Nazis are here and we shouldn’t
be playing the ‘Marseillaise,’ ” Humphrey Bogart just nods to the band, we cut
to the band, and they start playing “bah-bah-bah-ba/i. ’’
Someone asked what he did to make that beautiful scene work. He says, “they
called me in one day, Michael Curtiz, the director, said, ‘stand on the balcony
over there, and when I say “action” take a beat and nod,’ ’’which he did. That’s
great acting. Why? What more could he possibly have done? He was required
to nod, he nodded. There you have it. The audience is terribly moved by his
674 Technique
simple restraint in an emotional situation—and this is the essence of good the¬
ater: good theater is people doing extraordinarily moving tasks as simply as pos¬
sible. Contemporary play writing, filmmaking, and acting tend to offer us the
reverse—people performing mundane and predictable actions in an overblown
way. The good actor performs his tasks as simply and as unemotionally as possi¬
ble. This lets the audience “get the idea”—just as the juxtaposition of uninflected
images in service of a third idea creates the play in the mind of the audience.
Learn this, and go out and make the movie. You’ll get someone who knows
how to take a picture, or you learn how to take a picture; you get someone who
knows how to light, or you learn how to light. There’s no magic to it. Some peo¬
ple will be able to do some tasks better than others—depending upon the de¬
gree of their technical mastery and their aptitude for the task. Just like playing
the piano. Anybody can learn how to play the piano. For some people it will be
very, very difficult—but they can leam it. There’s almost no one who can’t learn
to play the piano. There’s a wide range in the middle, of people who can play
the piano with various degrees of skill; a very, very narrow band at the top, of
people who can play brilliantly and build upon a simple technical skill to create
great art. The same thing is true of cinematography and sound mixing. Just tech¬
nical skills. Directing is just a technical skill. Make your shot list.
Mollywood
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Scott Fitzgerald (1896—1940) went to work in Hollywood at a time when his alcoholism
had impaired his productivity and the quality of his writing. But Hollywood, which has
destroyed so many writers, was not all bad for him; it was there he finally stopped drink¬
ing and began The Last Tycoon which contains some of his best writing. And his expe¬
riences led to a lot of short stories, including this one, in which the character ofJoel Coles
might not be a million miles removedfrom Fitzgerald himself. It is interesting the way he
prepares the ground for Coles in the third paragraph, with the sentence "Ordinarily he
did not go out on Sundays but stayed sober and took work home with him."Only an al¬
coholic would take note of having stayed sober. But the story is about much more—is about,
in a sense, Miles Caiman, seen through the eyes of the supporting players in his life.
“Crazy Sunday”
It was Sunday—not a day, but rather a gap between two other days. Behind,
for all of them, lay sets and sequences, the long waits under the crane that swung
the microphone, the hundred miles a day by automobiles to and fro across a
county, the struggles of rival ingenuities in the conference rooms, the ceaseless
compromise, the clash and strain of many personalities fighting for their lives.
And now Sunday, with individual life starting up again, with a glow kindling in
eyes that had been glazed with monotony the afternoon before. Slowly as the
hours waned they came awake like “Puppenfeen” in a toy shop: an intense col¬
loquy in a corner, lovers disappearing to neck in a hall. And the feeling of
“Hurry, it’s not too late, but for God’s sake hurry before the blessed forty hours
of leisure are over.”
Joel Coles was writing continuity. He was twenty-eight and not yet broken
by Hollywood. He had had what were considered nice assignments since his ar¬
rival six months before and he submitted his scenes and sequences with enthu-
677
678 Hollywood
siasm. He referred to himself modestly as a hack but really did not think of it
that way. His mother had been a successful actress; Joel had spent his childhood
between London and New York trying to separate the real from the unreal, or
at least to keep one guess ahead. He was a handsome man with the pleasant cow-
brown eyes that in 1913 had gazed out at Broadway audiences from his mother’s
face.
When the invitation came it made him sure that he was getting somewhere.
Ordinarily he did not go out on Sundays but stayed sober and took work home
with him. Recently they had given him a Eugene O’Neill play destined for a very
important lady indeed. Everything he had done so far had pleased Miles Caiman,
and Miles Caiman was the only director on the lot who did not work under a
supervisor and was responsible to the money men alone. Everything was click¬
ing into place in Joel’s career. (“This is Mr. Caiman’s secretary. Will you come
to tea from four to six Sunday—he lives in Beverly Hills, number-.”)
Joel was flattered. It would be a party out of the top-drawer. It was a trib¬
ute to himself as a young man of promise. The Marion Davies crowd, the
high-hats, the big currency numbers, perhaps even Dietrich and Garbo and the
Marquis, people who were not seen everywhere, would probably be at Cai¬
man’s.
“I won’t take anything to drink,”he assured himself. Caiman was audibly tired
of rummies, and thought it was a pity the industry could not get along without
them.
Joel agreed that writers drank too much—he did himself, but he wouldn’t
this afternoon. He wished Miles would be within hearing when the cocktails were
passed to hear his succinct, unobtrusive, “No, thank you.”
Miles Caiman’s house was built for great emotional moments—there was an
air of listening, as if the far silences of its vistas hid an audience, but this after¬
noon it was thronged, as though people had been bidden rather than asked. Joel
noted with pride that only two other writers from the studio were in the crowd,
an ennobled limey and, somewhat to his surprise, Nat Keogh, who had evoked
Caiman’s impatient comment on drunks.
Stella Caiman (Stella Walker, of course) did not move on to her other guests
after she spoke to Joel. She lingered—she looked at him with the sort of beau¬
tiful look that demands some sort of acknowledgment and Joel drew quickly on
the dramatic adequacy inherited from his mother:
“Well, you look about sixteen! Where’s your kiddy car?”
She was visibly pleased; she lingered. He felt that he should say something
more, something confident and easy—he had first met her when she was strug¬
gling for bits in New York. At the moment a tray slid up and Stella put a cock¬
tail glass into his hand.
“Everybody’s afraid, aren’t they?” he said, looking at it absently. “Everybody
watches for everybody else’s blunders, or tries to make sure they’re with peo-
F. Scott Fitzgerald
679
pie that’ll do them credit. Of course that’s not true in your house,”he covered
himself hastily. “I just meant generally in Hollywood.”
Stella agreed. She presented several people to Joel as if he were very impor¬
tant. Reassuring himself that Miles was at the other side of the room, Joel drank
the cocktail.
“So you have a baby?” he said. “That’s the time to look out. After a pretty
woman has had her first child, she’s very vulnerable, because she wants to be
reassured about her own charm. She’s got to have some new man’s unqualified
devotion to prove to herself she hasn’t lost anything.”
“I never get anybody’s unqualified devotion,” Stella said rather resentfully.
“They’re afraid of your husband.”
“You think that’s it?” She wrinkled her brow over the idea; then the conver¬
sation was interrupted at the exact moment Joel would have chosen.
Her attentions had given him confidence. Not for him to join safe groups, to
slink to refuge under the wings of such acquaintances as he saw about the room.
He walked to the window and looked out towards the Pacific, colourless under
its sluggish sunset. It was good here—the American Riviera and all that, if there
were ever time to enjoy it. The handsome, well-dressed people in the room,
the lovely girls, and the—well, the lovely girls. You couldn’t have everything.
He saw Stella’s fresh boyish face, with the tired eyelid that always drooped
a little over one eye, moving about among her guests and he wanted to sit with
her and talk a long time as if she were a girl instead of a name; he followed her
to see if she paid anyone as much attention as she had paid him. He took another
cocktail—not because he needed confidence but because she had given him so
much of it. Then he sat down beside the director’s mother.
“Your son’s gotten to be a legend, Mrs. Caiman—Oracle and a Man of Des¬
tiny and all that. Personally, I’m against him but I’m in a minority. What do you
think of him? Are you impressed? Are you surprised how far he’s gone?”
“No, I’m not surprised,” she said calmly. “We always expected a lot from
Miles.”
“Well now, that’s unusual,” remarked Joel. “I always think all mothers are
like Napoleon’s mother. My mother didn’t want me to have anything to do with
the entertainment business. She wanted me to go to West Point and be safe.”
“We always had every confidence in Miles.” . . .
He stood by the built-in bar of the dining-room with the good-humoured,
heavy-drinking, highly paid Nat Keogh.
“—I made a hundred grand during the year and lost forty grand gambling,
so now I’ve hired a manager.”
“You mean an agent,” suggested Joel.
“No, I’ve got that too. I mean a manager. I make over everything to my wife
and then he and my wife get together and hand me out the money. I pay him
five thousand a year to hand me out my money.”
68 o
Hollywood
“You mean your agent.”
“No, I mean my manager, and I’m not the only one—a lot of other irre¬
sponsible people have him.”
“Well, if you’re irresponsible why are you responsible enough to hire a man¬
ager?”
“I’m just irresponsible about gambling. Look here—”
A singer performed; Joel and Nat went forward with the others to listen.
II
The singing reached Joel vaguely; he felt happy and friendly towards all the peo¬
ple gathered there, people of bravery and industry, superior to bourgeoisie that
outdid them in ignorance and loose living, risen to a position of the highest
prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained. He
liked them—he loved them. Great waves of good feeling flowed through him.
As the singer finished his number and there was a drift towards the hostess
to say good-bye, Joel had an idea. He would give them “Building It Up,” his own
composition. It was his only parlour trick, it had amused several parties and it
might please Stella Walker. Possessed by the hunch, his blood throbbing with
the scarlet corpuscles of exhibitionism, he sought her.
“Of course,” she cried. “Please! Do you need anything?”
“Someone has to be the secretary that I’m supposed to be dictating to.”
“I’ll be her.”
As the word spread, the guests in the hall, already putting on their coats to
leave, drifted back and Joel faced the eyes of many strangers. He had a dim fore¬
boding, realizing that the man who had just performed was a famous radio en¬
tertainer. Then someone said “Sh!” and he was alone with Stella, the centre of
a sinister Indian-like half-circle. Stellasmiled up at him expectantly—he began.
His burlesque was based upon the cultural limitations of Mr. Dave Silverstein,
an independent producer; Silverstein was presumed to be dictating a letter out¬
lining a treatment of a story he had bought.
“—a story of divorce, the younger generators and the Foreign Legion,” he
heard his voice saying, with the intonations of Mr. Silverstein. “But we got to
build it up, see?”
A sharp pang of doubt struck through him. The faces surrounding him in the
gently moulded light were intent and curious, but there was no ghost of a smile
anywhere; directly in front the Great Lover of the screen glared at him with an
eye as keen as the eye of a potato. Only Stella Walker looked up at him with a
radiant, never faltering smile.
“If we make him a Menjou type, then we get a sort of Michael Arlen only
with a Honolulu atmosphere.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
68
Still not a ripple in front, but in the rear a rustling, a perceptible shift towards
the left, towards the front door.
“—then she says she feels this sex appeal for him and he bums out and says,
‘Oh, go on destroy yourself—’ ”
At some point he heard Nat Keogh snicker and here and there were a few
encouraging faces, but as he finished he had the sickening realization that he had
made a fool of himself in view of an important section of the picture world, upon
whose favour depended his career.
For a moment he existed in the midst of a confused silence, broken by a gen¬
eral trek for the door. He felt the undercurrent of derision that rolled through
the gossip; then—all this was in the space of ten seconds—the Great Lover, his
eye hard and empty as the eye of a needle, shouted “Boo! Boo!” voicing in an
overtone what he felt was the mood of the crowd. It was the resentment of the
professional towards the amateur, of the community towards the stranger, the
thumbs-down of the clan.
Only Stella Walker was still standing near and thanking him as if he had been
an unparalleled success, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone hadn’t liked
it. As Nat Keogh helped him into his overcoat, a great wave of self-disgust
swept over him and he clung desperately to his rule of never betraying an infe¬
rior emotion until he no longer felt it.
“I was a flop,” he said lightly, to Stella. “Never mind, it’s a good number when
appreciated. Thanks for your co-operation.”
The smile did not leave her face—he bowed rather drunkenly and Nat drew
him towards the door. . . .
The arrival of his breakfast awakened him into a broken and ruined world.
Yesterday he was himself, a point of fire against an industry, to-day he felt that
he was pitted under an enormous disadvantage, against those faces, against in¬
dividual contempt and collective sneer. Worse than that, to Miles Caiman he
was to become one of those rummies, stripped of dignity, whom Caiman re¬
gretted he was compelled to use. To Stella Walker on whom he had forced a
martyrdom to preserve the courtesy of her house—her opinion he did not dare
to guess. His gastric juices ceased to flow and he set his poached eggs back on
the telephone table. He wrote:
Dear Miles:
You can imagine my profound self-disgust. I confess to a taint of exhibi¬
tionism, but at six o’clock in the afternoon, in broad daylight! Good God!
My apologies to your wife.
Yours ever,
Joel Coles
682
Hollywood
Joel emerged from his office on the lot only to slink like a malefactor to the
tobacco store. So suspicious was his manner that one of the studio police asked
to see his admission card. He had decided to eat lunch outside when Nat Keogh,
confident and cheerful, overtook him.
“What do you mean you’re in permanent retirement? What if that Three-
Piece Suit did boo you?
“Why, listen,” he continued, drawing Joel into the studio restaurant. “The
night of one of his premieres at Grauman’s, Joe Squires kicked his tail while he
was bowing to the crowd. The ham said Joe’d hear from him later but when Joe
called him up at eight o’clock next day and said, ‘I thought I was going to hear
from you,’ he hung up the phone.”
The preposterous story cheered Joel, and he found a gloomy consolation in
staring at the group at the next table, the sad, lovely Siamese twins, the mean
dwarfs, the proud giant from the circus picture. But looking beyond at the
yellow-stained faces of pretty women, their eyes all melancholy and startling
with mascara, their ball gowns garish in full day, he saw a group who had been
at Caiman’s and winced.
“Never again,” he exclaimed aloud, “absolutely my last social appearance in
Hollywood!”
The following morning a telegram was waiting for him at his office:
You were one of the most agreeable people at our party. Expect you at
my sister June’s buffet supper next Sunday.
Stella Walker Caiman
The blood rushed fast through his veins for a feverish minute. Incredulously
he read the telegram over.
“Well, that’s the sweetest thing I ever heard of in my life!”
Ill
Crazy Sunday again. Joel slept until eleven, then he read a newspaper to catch
up with the past week. He lunched in his room on trout, avocado salad and a
pint of California wine. Dressing for the tea, he selected a pin-check suit, a blue
shirt, a burnt orange tie. There were dark circles of fatigue under his eyes. In
his second-hand car he drove to the Riviera apartments. As he was introducing
himself to Stella’s sister, Miles and Stella arrived in riding clothes—they had been
quarrelling fiercely most of the afternoon on all the dirt roads back of Beverly
Hills.
Miles Caiman, tall, nervous, with a desperate humour and the unhappiest eyes
Joel ever saw, was an artist from the top ofhis curiously shaped head to his nig-
F. Scott Fitzgerald
683
gerish feet. Upon these last he stood firmly—he had never made a cheap pic¬
ture though he had sometimes paid heavily for the luxury of making experimental
flops. In spite of his excellent company, one could not be with him long with¬
out realizing that he was not a well man.
From the moment of their entrance Joel’s day bound itself up inextricably
with theirs. As he joined the group around them Stella turned away from it with
an impatient little tongue click—and Miles Caiman said to the man who hap¬
pened to be next to him:
“Go easy on Eva Goebel. There’s hell to pay about her at home.” Miles
turned to Joel, “I’m sorry I missed you at the office yesterday. I spent the af¬
ternoon at the analyst’s.”
“You being psychoanalysed?”
“I have been for months. First I went for claustrophobia, now I’m trying to
get my whole life cleared up. They say it’ll take over a year.”
“There’s nothing the matter with your life,” Joel assured him.
“Oh, no? Well, Stella seems to think so. Ask anybody—they can all tell you
about it,” he said bitterly.
A girl perched herself on the arm of Miles’s chair; Joel crossed to Stella, who
stood disconsolately by the fire.
“Thank you for your telegram,” he said. “It was darn sweet. I can’t imagine
anybody as good-looking as you are being so good-humoured.”
She was a little lovelier than he had ever seen her and perhaps the unstinted
admiration in his eyes prompted her to unload on him—it did not take long, for
she was obviously at the emotional bursting point.
“—and Miles has been carrying on this thing for two years, and I never knew.
Why, she was one of my best friends, always in the house. Finally when people
began to come to me, Miles had to admit it.”
She sat down vehemently on the arm of Joel’s chair. Her riding breeches were
the colour of the chair and Joel saw that the mass of her hair was made up of
some strands of red gold and some of pale gold, so that it could not be dyed,
and that she had on no make-up. She was that good-looking—
Still quivering with the shock of her discovery, Stella found unbearable the
spectacle of a new girl hovering over Miles; she led Joel into a bedroom, and
seated at either end of a big bed they went on talking. People on their way to
the washroom glanced in and made wisecracks, but Stella, emptying out her
story, paid no attention. After a while Miles stuck his head in the door and said,
“There’s no use trying to explain something to Joel in half an hour that I don’t
understand myself and the psychoanalyst says will take a whole year to under¬
stand.”
She talked on as if Miles were not there. She loved Miles, she said—under
considerable difficulties she had always been faithful to him.
“The psychoanalyst told Miles that he had a mother complex. In his first mar-
684 Hollywood
riage he transferred his mother complex to his wife, you see—and then his sex
turned to me. But when we married the thing repeated itself—he transferred
his mother complex to me and all his libido turned towards this other woman.”
Joel knew that this probably wasn’t gibberish—yet it sounded like gibber¬
ish. He knew Eva Goebel; she was a motherly person, older and probably wiser
than Stella, who was a golden child.
Miles now suggested impatiently that Joel come back with them since Stella
had so much to say, so they drove out to the mansion in Beverly Hills. Under
the high ceilings the situation seemed more dignified and tragic. It was an eerie
bright night with the dark very clear outside of all the windows and Stella all
rose-gold raging and crying around the room. Joel did not quite believe in pic¬
ture actresses’ grief. They have other preoccupations—they are beautiful rose-
gold figures blown full of life by writers and directors, and after hours they sit
around and talk in whispers and giggle innuendoes, and the ends of many ad¬
ventures flow through them.
Sometimes he pretended to listen and instead thought how well she was got
up—sleek breeches with a matched set of legs in them, an Italian-coloured
sweater with a little high neck, and a short brown chamois coat. He couldn’t
decide whether she was an imitation of an English lady or an English lady was
an imitation of her. She hovered somewhere between the realest of realities and
the most blatant of impersonations.
“Miles is so jealous of me that he questions everything I do,” she cried scorn¬
fully. “When I was in New York 1 wrote him that I’d been to the theatre with
Eddie Baker. Miles was so jealous he phoned me ten times in one day.”
“I was wild,” Miles snuffled sharply, a habit he had in times of stress. “The
analyst couldn’t get any results for a week.”
Stella shook her head despairingly. “Did you expect m e just t o sit i n the hotel
for three weeks?”
“I don’t expect anything. I admit that I’m jealous. I try not to be. I worked
on that with Dr. Bridgebane, but it didn’t do any good. I was jealous of Joel this
afternoon when you sat on the arm of his chair.”
“You were?” She started up. “You were! Wasn’t there somebody on the arm
of your chair? And did you speak to me for two hours?”
“You were telling your troubles to Joel in the bedroom.”
“When I think that that woman”—she seemed to believe that to omit Eva
Goebel’s name would be to lessen her reality—“used to come here—”
“All right—all right,” said Miles wearily. “I’ve admitted everything and I
feel as bad about it as you do.” Turning to Joel he began talking about pictures,
while Stella moved restlessly along the far walls, her hands in her breeches
pockets.
“They’ve treated Miles terribly,” she said, coming suddenly back into the con-
F. Scott Fitzgerald
68 j
versation as if they’d never discussed her personal affairs. “Dear, tell him about
old Beltzer trying to change your picture.”
As she stood hovering protectively over Miles, her eyes flashing with indig¬
nation in his behalf, Joel realized that he was in love with her. Stifled with ex¬
citement he got up to say good night.
With Monday the week resumed its workaday rhythm, in sharp contrast to
the theoretical discussions, the gossip and scandal of Sunday; there was the end¬
less detail of script revision—“Instead of a lousy dissolve, we can leave her
voice on the sound track and cut to a medium shot of the taxi from Bell’s angle
or we can simply pull the camera back to include the station, hold it a minute
and then pan to the row of taxis”—by Monday afternoon Joel had again forgot¬
ten that people whose business was to provide entertainment were ever privi¬
leged to be entertained. In the evening he phoned Miles’s house. He asked for
Miles but Stella came to the phone.
“Do things seem better?”
“Not particularly. What are you doing next Saturday evening?”
“Nothing.”
“The Perrys are giving a dinner and theatre party and Miles won’t be here—
he’s flying to South Bend to see the Notre Dame-Califomia game. I thought you
might go with me in his place.”
After a long moment Joel said, “Why—surely. If there’s a conference I can’t
make dinner but I can get to the theatre.”
“Then I’ll say we can come.”
Joel walked to his office. In view of the strained relations of the Caimans,
would Miles be pleased, or did she intend that Miles shouldn’t know of it? That
would be out of the question—if Miles didn’t mention it Joel would. But it was
an hour or more before he could get down to work again.
Wednesday there was a four-hour wrangle in a conference room crowded
with planets and nebulae of cigarette smoke. Three men and a woman paced the
carpet in turn, suggesting or condemning, speaking sharply or persuasively, con¬
fidently or despairingly. At the end Joel lingered to talk to Miles.
The man was tired—not with the exaltation of fatigue but life-tired, with
his lids sagging and his beard prominent over the blue shadows near his
mouth.
“I hear you’re flying to the Notre Dame game.”
Miles looked beyond him and shook his head.
“I’ve given up the idea.”
“Why?”
“On account of you.” Still he did not look at Joel.
“What the hell, Miles?”
“That’s why I’ve given it up.” He broke into a perfunctory laugh at himself.
686 Hollywood
“I can’t tell what Stella might do just out of spite—she’s invited you to take her
to the Perrys’, hasn’t she? I wouldn’t enjoy the game.”
The fine instinct that moved swiftly and confidently on the set muddled so
weakly and helplessly through his personal life.
“Look, Miles,” Joel said frowning. “I’ve never made any passes whatsoever
at Stella. If you’re really seriously cancelling your trip on account of me, I won’t
go to the Perrys’ with her. I won’t see her. You can trust me absolutely.”
Miles looked at him, carefully now.
“Maybe.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Anyhow there'd just be somebody else.
I wouldn’t have any fun.”
“You don’t seem to have much confidence in Stella. She told me she’d always
been true to you.”
“Maybe she has.” In the last few minutes several more muscles had sagged
around Miles’s mouth. “But how can I ask anything of her after what’s happened?
How can I expect her—” He broke off and his face grew harder as he said, “I’ll
tell you one thing, right or wrong and no matter what I’ve done, if I ever had
anything on her I’d divorce her. I can’t have my pride hurt—that would be the
last straw.”
His tone annoyed Joel, but he said:
“Hasn’t she calmed down about the Eva Goebel thing?”
“No.” Miles snuffled pessimistically. “I can’t get over it either.”
“I thought it was finished.”
“I’m trying not to see Eva again, but you know it isn’t easy just to drop some¬
thing like that—it isn’t some girl I kissed last night in a taxi. The psychoanalyst
»
says—
“I know,” Joel interrupted. “Stella told me.” This was depressing. “Well, as
far as I’m concerned if you go to the game I won’t see Stella. And I’m sure Stella
has nothing on her conscience about anybody.”
“Maybe not,” Miles repeated listlessly. “Anyhow I’ll stay and take her to the
party. Say,” he said suddenly, “I wish you’d come too. I’ve got to have some¬
body sympathetic to talk to. That’s the trouble—I’ve influenced Stella in every¬
thing. Especially I’ve influenced her so that she likes all the men I like—it’s very
difficult.”
“It must be,” Joel agreed.
IV
Joel could not get to the dinner. Self-conscious in his silk hat against the unem¬
ployment, he waited for the others in front of the Hollywood Theatre and
watched the evening parade: obscure replicas of bright, particular picture stars,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
687
spavined men in polo coats, a stomping dervish with the beard and staff of an
apostle, a pair of chic Filipinos in collegiate clothes, reminder that this comer
of the Republic opened to the seven seas, a long fantastic carnival of young shouts
which proved to be a fraternity initiation. The line split to pass two smart lim¬
ousines that stopped at the curb.
There she was, in a dress like ice-water, made in a thousand pale-blue pieces,
with icicles trickling at the throat. He started forward.
“So you like my dress?”
“Where’s Miles?”
“He flew to the game after all. He left yesterday morning—at least I think—”
She broke off. “I just got a telegram from South Bend saying that he’s starting
back. I forgot—you know all these people?”
The party of eight moved into the theatre.
Miles had gone after all and Joel wondered if he should have come. But dur¬
ing the performance, with Stella a profile under the pure grain of light hair, he
thought no more about Miles. Once he turned and looked at her and she looked
back at him, smiling and meeting his eyes for as long as he wanted. Between the
acts they smoked in the lobby and she whispered:
“They’re all going to the opening of Jack Johnson’s night club—I don’t want
to go, do you?”
“Do we have to?”
“I suppose not.” She hesitated. “I’d like to talk to you. I suppose we could go
to our house—if I were only sure—”
Again she hesitated and Joel asked:
“Sure of what?”
“Sure that—oh, I’m haywire I know, but how can I be sure Miles went to
the game?”
“You mean you think he’s with Eva Goebel?”
“No, not so much that—but supposing he was here watching everything I do.
You know Miles does odd things sometimes. Once he wanted a man with a long
beard to drink tea with him and he sent down to the casting agency for one, and
drank tea with him all afternoon.”
“That’s different. He sent you a wire from South Bend—that proves he’s at
the game.”
After the play they said good night to the others at the curb an d were answered
by looks of amusement. They slid off along the golden garish thoroughfare
through the crowd that had gathered around Stella.
“You see he could arrange the telegrams,” Stella said, “very easily.”
That was true. And with the idea that perhaps her uneasiness was justified,
Joel grew angry: if Miles had trained a camera on them he felt no obligations to¬
wards Miles. Aloud he said:
688 Hollywood
“That’s nonsense.”
There were Christmas trees already in the shop windows and the full moon
over the boulevard was only a prop, as scenic as the giant boudoir lamps of the
comers. On into the dark foliage of Beverly Hills that flamed as eucalyptus by
day, Joel saw only the flash of a white face under his own, the arc of her shoul¬
der. She pulled away suddenly and looked up at him.
“Your eyes are like your mother’s,” she said. “I used to have a scrap book full
of pictures of her.”
“Your eyes are like your own and not a bit like any other eyes,” he answered.
Something made Joel look out into the grounds as they went into the house,
as if Miles were lurking in the shubbery. A telegram waited on the hall table.
She read aloud:
Chicago
Home tomorrow night. Thinking of you. Love.
Miles
“You see,” she said, throwing the slip back on the table, “he could easily have
faked that.” She asked the butler for drinks and sandwiches and ran upstairs, while
Joel walked into the empty receptions rooms. Strolling about he wandered to
the piano where he had stood in disgrace two Sundays before.
“Then we could put over,” he said aloud, “a story of divorce, the younger gen¬
eration and the Foreign Legion.”
His thoughts jumped to another telegram.
“You were one of the most agreeable people at our party—”
An idea occurred to him. If Stella’s telegram had been purely a gesture of
courtesy then it was likely that Miles had inspired it, for it was Miles who had
invited him. Probably Miles had said:
“Send him a wire—he’s miserable—he thinks he’s queered himself.”
It fitted in with “I’ve influenced Stella in everything. Especially I’ve influenced
her so that she likes all the men I like.” A woman would do a thing like that be¬
cause she felt sympathetic—only a man would do it because he felt responsible.
When Stella came back into the room he took both her hands.
“I have a strange feeling that I’m a sort of pawn in a spite game you’re play¬
ing against Miles,” he said.
“Help yourself to a drink.”
“And the odd thing is that I’m in love with you anyhow.”
The telephone rang and she freed herself to answer it.
“Another wire from Miles,” she announced. “He dropped it, or it says he
dropped it, from the aeroplane at Kansas City.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
689
“I suppose he asked to be remembered to me.”
“No, he just said he loved me. I believe he does. He’s so very weak.”
“Come sit beside me,” Joel urged her.
It was early. And it was still a few minutes short of midnight a half -hour later,
when Joel walked to the cold hearth, and said tersely:
“Meaning that you haven’t any curiosity about me?”
“Not at all. You attract me a lot and you know it. The point is that I suppose
I really do love Miles.”
“Obviously.”
“And to-night I feel uneasy about everything.”
He wasn’t angry—he was even faintly relieved that a possible entanglement
was avoided. Still as he looked at her, the warmth and softness of her body thaw¬
ing her cold blue costume, he knew she was one of the things he would always
regret.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll phone a taxi.”
“Nonsense—there’s a chauffeur on duty.”
He winced at her readiness to have him go, and seeing this she kissed him
lightly and said, “You’re sweet, Joel.” Then suddenly three things happened: he
took down his drink at a gulp, the phone rang loud through the house and a clock
in the hall struck in trumpet notes.
Nine — ten — eleven — twelve —
V
It was Sunday again. Joel realized that he had come to the theatre this evening
with the work of the week still hanging about him like cerements. He had made
love to Stella as he might attack some matter to be cleaned up hurriedly before
the day’s end. But this was Sunday—the lovely, lazy perspective of the next
twenty-four hours unrolled bef ore him—every minute was something to be ap¬
proached with lulling indirection, every moment held the germ of innumerable
possibilities. Nothing was impossible—everything was just beginning. He poured
himself another drink.
With a sharp moan, Stella slipped forward inertly by the telephone. Joel
picked her up and laid her on the sofa. He squirted soda-water on a handker¬
chief and slapped it over her face. The telephone mouthpiece was still grinding
and he put it to his ear.
“—the plane fell just this side of Kansas City. The body of Miles Caiman has
been identified and—”
He hung up the receiver.
“Lie still,” he said, stalling, as Stella opened her eyes.
690
Hollywood
“Oh, what’s happened?” she whispered. “Call them back. Oh, what’s hap¬
pened?”
“I’ll call them right away. What’s your doctor’s name?”
“Did they say Miles was dead?”
“Lie quiet—is there a servant still up?”
“Hold me—I’m frightened.”
He put his arm around her.
“I want the name of your doctor,” he said sternly. “It may be a mistake but I
want someone here.”
“It’s Doctor—Oh, God, is Miles dead?”
Joel ran upstairs and searched through strange medicine cabinets for spirits
of ammonia. When he came down Stella cried:
“He isn’t dead—I know he isn’t. This is part of his scheme. He’s torturing
me. I know he’s alive. I can feel he’s alive.”
“I want to get hold of some close friend of yours, Stella. You can’t stay here
alone to-night.”
“Oh, no,” she cried. “I can’t see anybody. You stay, I haven’t got any friend.”
She got up, tears streaming down her face. “Oh, Miles is my only friend. He’s
not dead—he can’t be dead. I’m going there right away and see. Get a train.
You’ll have to come with me.”
“You can’t. There’s nothing to do to-night. I want you to tell me the name
of some woman I can call: Lois? Joan? Carmel? Isn’t there somebody?”
Stella stared at him blindly.
“Eva Goebel was my best friend,” she said.
Joel thought of Miles, his sad and desperate face in the office two days be¬
fore. In the awful silence of his death all was clear about him. He was the only
American-bom director with both an interesting temperament and an artistic
conscience. Meshed in an industry, he had paid with his ruined nerves for hav¬
ing no resilience, no healthy cynicism, no refuge—only a pitiful and precarious
escape.
There was a sound at the outer door—it opened suddenly, and there were
footsteps in the hall.
“Miles!” Stella screamed. “Is it you, Miles? Oh, it’s Miles.”
A telegraph boy appeared in the doorway.
“I couldn’t find the bell. I heard you talking inside.”
The telegram was a duplicate of the one that had been phoned. While Stella
read it over and over, as though it were a black lie, Joel telephoned. It was still
early and he had difficulty getting anyone; when finally he succeeded in finding
some friends he made Stella take a stiff drink.
“You’ll stay here, Joel,” she whispered, as though she were half-asleep. “You
won’t go away. Miles liked you—he said you—” She shivered violently, “Oh,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
69
my God, you don’t know how alone I feel!” Her eyes closed. “Put your arms
around me. Miles had a suit like that.” She started bolt upright. “Think of what
he must have felt. He was afraid of almost everything, anyhow.”
She shook her head dazedly. Suddenly she seized Joel’s face and held it close
to hers.
“You won’t go. You like me—you love me, don’t you? Don’t call up any¬
body. To-morrow’s time enough. You stay here with me to-night.”
He stared at her, at first incredulously, and then with shocked understand¬
ing. In her dark groping Stella was trying to keep Miles alive by sustaining a
situation in which he had figured—as if Miles’s mind could not die so long as
the possibilities that had worried him still existed. It was a distraught and tor¬
tured effort to stave off the realization that he was dead.
Resolutely Joel went to the phone and called a doctor.
“Don’t, oh, don’t call anybody!” Stella cried. “Come back here and put your
arms around me.”
“Is Doctor Bales in?”
“Joel,” Stella cried. “I thought I could count on you. Miles liked you. He was
jealous of you—Joel, come here.”
Ah then—ifhe betrayed Miles she would be keeping him alive—for if he were
really dead how could he be betrayed?
“—has just had a very severe shock. Can you come at once, and get hold of
a nurse?”
“Joel!”
Now the door-bell and the telephone began to ring intermittently, and au¬
tomobiles were stopping in front of the door.
“But you’re not going,” Stella begged him. “You’re going to stay, aren’t
you?”
“No,” he answered. “But I’ll be back, if you need me.”
Standing on the steps of the house which now hummed and palpitated with
the life that flutters around death like protective leaves, he began to sob a little
in his throat.
“Everything he touched he did something magical to,” he thought. “He even
brought that little gamine alive and made her a sort of masterpiece.”
And then:
“What a hell of a hole he leaves in this damn wilderness—already!”
And then with a certain bitterness, “Oh, yes, I’ll be back—I’ll be back!”
692
Hollywood
FIober-t Bloch
Robert Bloch (1917—1994) wonjilm immortality for providing Hitchcock with the ma¬
terials for Psycho. But he was a prolific author of novels, screenplays, and short stories,
and in this little-known tale he uses the freedom of fantasy in order to explain the curi¬
ous lure that draws extras back day after day to work Iong hours and be treated like cat¬
tle, for a few dollars and the promise of proximity to cinematic glory. This story strikes a
chord in me because 1 have often met people so obsessed with the movies that they scruti¬
nize them deeply, trying to extract hidden signs and messages.
“The Movie People”
Two thousand stars.
Two thousand stars, maybe more, set in the sidewalks along Hollywood
Boulevard, each metal slab inscribed with the name of someone in the movie
industry. They go way back, those names; from Broncho Billy Anderson to
Adolph Zukor, everybody’s there.
Everybody but Jimmy Rogers.
You won’t find Jimmy’s name because he wasn’t a star, not even a bit
player—just an extra.
“But I deserve it,” he told me. “I’m entitled, if anybody is. Started out here
in 19 2 o when I was just a punk kid. You look close, you’ll spot me in the crowd
shots in TheMarkofZorro. Been in over 450 pictures since, and still going strong.
Ain’t many left who can beat that record. You’d think it would entitle a fella to
something.”
Maybe it did, but there was no star for Jimmy Rogers, and that bit about still
going strong was just a crock. Nowadays Jimmy was lucky if he got a casting call
once or twice a year; there just isn’t any spot for an old-timer with a white muff
except in a western barroom scene.
Robert Bloch
693
Most of the time Jimmy just strolled the boulevard; a tall, soldierly-erect in¬
congruity in the crowd of tourists, fags and freakouts. His home address was on
Las Palmas, somewhere south of Sunset. I’d never been there but I could guess
what it was—one of those old frame bungalow-court sweatboxes put up about
the time he crashed the movies and still standing somehow by the grace of God
and the disgrace of the housing authorities. That’s the sort of place Jimmy stayed
at, but he didn’t really live there.
Jimmy Rogers lived at the Silent Movie.
The Silent Movie is over on Fairfax, and it’s the only place in town where
you can still go and see The Mark oJZorro. There’s always a Chaplin comedy, and
usually Laurel and Hardy, along with a serial starring Pearl White, Elmo Lin¬
coln, or Houdini. And the features are great—early Griffith and DeMille, Bar¬
rymore in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
Valentino in Blood and Sand, and a hundred more.
The bill changes every Wednesday, and every Wednesday night Jimmy
Rogers was there, plunking down his ninety cents at the box office to watch The
Black Pirate or Son of the Shiek or Orphans of the Storm.
To live again.
Because Jimmy didn’t go there to see Doug and Mary or Rudy or Clara or
Gloria or the Gish sisters. He went there to see himself, in the crowd shots.
At least that’s the way I figured it, the first time I met him. They were play¬
ing The Phantom of the Opera that night, and afterward I spent the intermission
with a cigarette outside the theatre, studying the display of stills.
If you asked me under oath, I couldn’t tell you how our conversation started,
but that’s where I first heard Jimmy’s routine about the 450 pictures and still
going strong.
“Did you see me in there tonight?” he asked.
I stared at him and shook my head; even with the shabby hand-me-down suit
and the white beard, Jimmy Rogers wasn’t the kind you’d spot in an audience.
“Guess it was too dark for me to notice,” I said.
“But there were torches,” Jimmy told me. “I carried one.”
Then I got the message. He was in the picture.
Jimmy smiled and shrugged. “Hell, I keep forgetting. You wouldn’t recog¬
nize me. We did The Phantom way back in ’twenty-five. I looked so young they
slapped a mustache on me in Make-up and a black wig. Hard to spot me in the
catacombs scenes—all long shots. But there at the end, where Chaney is hold¬
ing back the mob, I show up pretty good in the background, just left of Charley
Zimmer. He’s the one shaking his fist. I’m waving my torch. Had a lot of trou¬
ble with that picture, but we did this shot in one take.”
In weeks to come I saw more of Jimmy Rogers. Sometimes he was up there
on the screen, though truth to tell, I never did recognize him: he was a young
694 Hollywood
man in those films of the twenties, and his appearances were limited to a flick¬
ering flash, a blurred face glimpsed in a crowd.
But always Jimmy was in the audience, even though he hadn’t played in the
picture. And one night I found out why.
Again it was intermission time and we were standing outside. By now Jimmy
had gotten into the habit of talking to me and tonight we’d been seated together
during the showing of The Covered Wagon.
We stood outside and Jimmy blinked at me. “Wasn’t she beautiful?” he asked.
“They don’t look like that any more.”
I nodded. “Lois Wilson? Very attractive.”
“I’m talking about June.”
I stared at Jimmy and then I realized he wasn’t blinking. He was crying.
“June Logan. My girl. This was her first bit, the Indian attack scene. Must
have been seventeen—I didn’t know her then, it was two years later we met
over at First National. But you must have noticed her. She was the one with the
long blond curls.”
“Oh, that one.” I nodded again. “You’re right. She was lovely.”
And I was a liar, because I didn’t remember seeing her at all, but I wanted to
make the old man feel good.
“Junie’s in a lot of the pictures they show here. And from ’twenty-five on,
we played in a flock of ’em together. For a while we talked about getting
hitched, but she started working her way up, doing bits—maids and such—and
I never broke out of extra work. Both of us had been in the business long enough
to know it was no go, not when one of you stays small and the other is headed
for a big career.”
Jimmy managed a grin ashe wiped his eyes with something which might once
have been a handkerchief. “You think I’m kidding, don’t you? About the career,
I mean. But she was going great, she would have been playing second leads pretty
soon.”
“What happened?” I asked.
The grin dissolved and the blinking returned. “Sound killed her.”
“She didn’t have a voice for talkies?”
Jimmy shook his head. “She had a great voice. I told you she was all set for
second leads—by nineteen thirty she’d been in a dozen talkies. Then sound killed
her.”
I’d heard the expression a thousand times, but never like this. Because the
way Jimmy told the story, that’s exactly what had happened. June Logan, his
girl Junie, was on the set during the shooting of one of those early ALL talking—
ALL singing — ALL dancing epics. The director and camera crew, seeking to break
away from the tyranny of the stationary microphone, rigged up one of the first
traveling mikes on a boom. Such items weren’t standard equipment yet, and this
Robert Bloch
69 J
was an experiment. Somehow, during a take, it broke loose and the boom
crashed, crushing June Logan’s skull.
It never made the papers, not even the trades; the studio hushed it up and
June Logan had a quiet funeral.
“Damn near forty years ago,” Jimmy said. “And here I am, crying like it was
yesterday. But she was my girl—”
And that was the other reason why Jimmy Rogers went to the Silent Movie.
To visit his girl.
“Don’t you see?” he told me. “She’s still alive up there on the screen, in all
those pictures. Just the way she was when we were together. Five years we had,
the best years for me.”
I could see that. The two of them in love, with each other and with the movies.
Because in those days, people did love the movies. And to actually be in them,
even in tiny roles, was the average person’s idea of seventh heaven.
Seventh Heaven, that’s another film we saw with June Logan playing a crowd
scene. In the following weeks, with Jimmy’s help, I got so I could spot his girl.
And he’d told the truth—she was a beauty. Once you noticed her, really saw
her, you wouldn’t forget. Those blond ringlets, that smile, identified her im¬
mediately .
One Wednesday night Jimmy and I were sitting together watching The Birth
of a Nation. During a street shot Jimmy nudged my shoulder. “Look, there’s
June.”
I peered up at the screen, then shook my head. “I don’t see her.”
“Wait a second—there she is again. See, off to the left, behind Walthall’s
shoulder?”
There was a blurred image and then the camera followed Henry B. Walthall
as he moved away.
I glanced at Jimmy. He was rising from his seat.
“Where you going?”
He didn’t answer me, just marched outside.
When I followed I found him leaning against the wall under the marquee and
breathing hard; his skin was the color of his whiskers.
“Junie,” he murmured. “I saw her—”
I took a deep breath. “Listen to me. You told me her first picture was The
Covered Wagon. That was made in 1923. And Griffith shot The Birth of a Nation
in 1914.
Jimmy didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. We both knew what
we were going to do—march back into the theatre and see the second show.
When the scene screened again we were watching and waiting. I looked at
the screen, then glanced at Jimmy.
“She’s gone,” he whispered. “She’s not in the picture.”
696 Hollywood
“She never was,” I told him. “You know that.”
“Yeah.” Jimmy got up and drifted out into the night, and I didn’t see him again
until the following week.
That’s when they showed the short feature with Charles Ray—I’ve forgot¬
ten the title, but he played his usual country-boy role, and there was a baseball
game in the climax with Ray coming through to win.
The camera panned across the crowd sitting in the bleachers and I caught a
momentary glimpse of a smiling girl with long blond curls.
“Did you see her?” Jimmy grabbed my arm.
“That girl—”
“It was Junie. She winked at me!”
This time I was the one who got up and walked out. He followed, and I was
waiting in front of the theatre, right next to the display poster.
“See for yourself.” I nodded at the poster. “This picture was made in 1917.”
I forced a smile. “You forget, there were thousands of pretty blond extras in pic¬
tures and most of them wore curls.”
He stood there shaking, not listening to me at all, and I put my hand on his
shoulder. “Now look here—”
“I been looking here,” Jimmy said. “Week after week, year after year. And
you might as well know the truth. This ain’t the first time it’s happened. Junie
keeps turning up in picture after picture I know she never made. Not just the
early ones, before her time, but later, during the twenties when I knew her,
when I knew exactly what she was playing in. Sometimes it’s only a quick flash,
but I see her—then she’s gone again. And the next running, she doesn’t come
back.
“It got so that for a while I was almost afraid to go see a show—figured I was
cracking up. But now you’ve seen her too—”
I shook my head slowly. “Sorry, Jimmy. I never said that.” I glanced at him,
then gestured toward my car at the curb. “You look tired. Come on, I’ll drive
you home.”
He looked worse than tired; he looked lost and lonely and infinitely old. But
there was a stubborn glint in his eyes, and he stood his ground.
“No, thanks. I’m gonna stick around for the second show.”
As I slid behind the wheel I saw him turn and move into the theatre, into
the place where the present becomes the past and the past becomes the present.
Up above in the booth they call it a projection machine, but it’s really a time
machine; it can take you back, play tricks with your imagination and your mem¬
ory. A girl dead forty years comes alive again, and an old man relives his van¬
ished youth—
But I belonged in the real world, and that’s where I stayed. I didn’t go to the
Silent Movie the next week or the week following.
Robert Bloch
697
And the next time I saw Jimmy was almost a month later, on the set.
They were shooting a western, one of my scripts, and the director wanted
some additional dialogue to stretch a sequence. So they called me in, and I drove
all the way out to location, at the ranch.
Most of the studios have a ranch spread for western action sequences, and
this was one of the oldest: it had been in use since the silent days. What fasci¬
nated me was the wooden fort where they were doing the crowd scene—I could
swear I remembered it from one of the first Tim McCoy pictures. So after I hud¬
dled with the director and scribbled a few extra lines for the principals, I began
nosing around behind the fort, just out of curiosity, while they set up for the
new shots.
Out front was the usual organized confusion; cast and crew milling around
the trailers, extras sprawled on the grass drinking coffee. But here in the back I
was all alone, prowling around in musty, log-lined rooms built for use in for¬
gotten features. Hoot Gibson had stood at this bar, and Jack Hoxie had swung
from this dance-hall chandelier. Here was a dust-covered table where Fred
Thomson sat, and around the comer, in the cut-away bunkhouse—
Around the comer, in the cut-away bunkhouse, Jimmy Rogers sat on the edge
of a mildewed mattress and stared up at me, startled, as I moved forward.
“You—?”
Quickly I explained my presence. There was no need for him to explain his;
casting had called and given him a day’s work here in the crowd shots.
“They been stalling all day, and it’s hot out there. I figured maybe I could
sneak back here and catch me a little nap in the shade.”
“How’d you know where to go?” I asked. “Ever been here before?”
“Sure. Forty years ago in this very bunkhouse. Junie and I, we used to come
here during lunch break and—”
He stopped.
“What’s wrong?”
Something was wrong. On the pan make-up face of it, Jimmy Rogers was the
perfect picture of the grizzled western old-timer: buckskin britches, fringed
shirt, white whiskers and all. But under the make-up was pallor, and the hands
holding the envelope were trembling.
The envelope—
He held it out to me. “Here. Mebbe you better read this.”
The envelope was unsealed, unstamped, unaddressed. It contained four
folded pages covered with fine handwriting. I removed them slowly. Jimmy
stared at me.
“Found it lying here on the mattress when I came in,” he murmured. “Just
waiting for me.”
“But what is it? Where’d it come from?”
698 Hollywood
“Read it and see.”
As I started to unfold the pages the whistle blew. We both knew the signal:
the scene was set up, they were ready to roll, principals and extras were wanted
out there before the cameras.
Jimmy Rogers stood up and moved off, a tired old man shuffling out into the
hot sun. I waved at him, then sat down on the moldering mattress and opened
the letter. The handwriting was faded, and there was a thin film of dust on the
pages. But I could still read it, every word. . . ,
Darling:
I’ve been trying to reach you so long and in so many ways. Of course I’ve
seen you, but it’s so dark out there I can’t always be sure, and then too
you’ve changed a lot through the years.
But I do see you, quite often, even though it’s only for a moment. And
I hope you’ve seen me, because I always try to wink or make some kind
of motion to attract your attention.
The only thing is, I can’t do too much or show myself too long or it
would make trouble. That’s the big secret—keeping in the background,
so the others won’t notice me. It wouldn’t do to frighten anybody, or even
to get anyone wondering why there are more people in the background
of a shot than there should be.
That’s something for you to remember, darling, just in case. You’re
always safe, as long as you stay clear of closeups. Costume pictures are the
best—about all you have to do is wave your arms once in a while and shout,
“On to the Bastille,” or something like that. It really doesn’t matter ex¬
cept to lip-readers, because it’s silent, of course.
Oh, there’s a lot to watch out for. Being a dress extra has its points,
but not in ballroom sequences—too muchdancing. That goes for parties,
too, particularly in a DeMille production where they’re “making whoopee”
or one of von Stroheim’s orgies. Besides, von Stroheim’s scenes are al¬
ways cut.
It doesn’t hurt to be cut, don’t misunderstand about that. It’s no dif¬
ferent than an ordinary fadeout at the end of a scene, and then you’re free
to go into another picture. Anything that was ever made, as long as there’s
still a print available for running somewhere. It’s like falling asleep and
then having one dream after another. The dreams are the scenes, of course,
but while the scenes are playing, they’re real.
I’m not the only one, either. There’s no telling how many others do
the same thing; maybe hundreds for all I know, but I’ve recognized a few
I’m sure of and I think some of them have recognized me. We never let
Robert Bloch
699
on to each other that we know, because it wouldn’t do to make anybody
suspicious.
Sometimes I think that if we could talk it over, we might come up with
a better understanding of just how it happens, and why. But the point is,
you can't talk, everything is silent; all you do is mo ve your lips and if you
tried to communicate such a difficult thing in pantomime you’d surely at¬
tract attention.
I guess the closest I can come to explaining it is to say it’s like reincar¬
nation—you can play a thousand roles, take or reject any part you want,
as long as you don’t make yourself conspicuous or do something that
would change the plot.
Naturally you get used to certain things. The silence, of course. And if
you’re in a bad print there’s flickering; sometimes even the air seems
grainy, and for a few frames you may be faded or out of focus.
Which reminds me—another thing to stay away from, the slapstick
comedies. Sennett’s early stuff is the worst, but Larry Semon and some
of the others are just as bad; all that speeded-up camera action makes you
dizzy.
Once, you can learn to adjust, it’s all right, even when you’re looking
off the screen into the audience. At first the darkness is a little frighten¬
ing—you have to remind yourself it’s only a theatre and there are just peo¬
ple out there, ordinary people watching a show. They don’t know you can
see them. They don’t know that as long as your scene runs, you’re just as
real as they are, only in a different way. You walk, run, smile, frown,
drink, eat—
That’s another thing to remember, about the eating. Stay out of those
Poverty Row quickies where everything is cheap and faked. Go where
there’s real set-dressing, big productions with banquet scenes and real
food. If you work fast you can grab enough in a few minutes, while you’re
off-camera, to last you.
The big rule is, always be careful. Don’t get caught. There’s so little
time, and you seldom get an opportunity to do anything on your own, even
in a long sequence. It’s taken me forever to get this chance to write you—
I’ve planned it for so long, my darling, but it just wasn’t possible until now.
This scene is playing outside the fort, but there’s quite a large crowd
of settlers and wagon-train people, and I had a chance to slip away inside
here to the rooms in back—they’re on camera in the background all dur¬
ing the action. I found this stationery and a pen, and I’m scribbling just as
fast as I can. Hope you can read it. That is, if you ever get the chance!
Naturally, I can’t mail it—but I have a funny hunch. You see, I noticed
that standing set back here, the bunkhouse, where you and I used to come
700
Hollywood
in the old days. I’m going to leave this letter under the mattress, and
pray.
Yes, darling, I pray. Someone or something knows about us, and about
how we feel. How we felt about being in the movies. That’s why I’m here,
I’m sure of that: because I’ve always loved pictures so. Someone who
knows that must also know how I loved you. And still do.
I think there must be many heavens and many hells, each of us making
his own, and—
The letter broke off there.
No signature, but of course I didn’t need one. And it wouldn’t have proved
anything. A lonely old man, nursing his love for forty years, keeping her alive
inside himself somewhere until she broke out in the form of a visual hallucina¬
tion up there on the screen—such a man could conceivably go all the way into
a schizoid split, even to the point where he could imitate a woman’s handwrit¬
ing as he set down the rationalization of his obsession.
I started to fold the letter, then dropped it on the mattress as the shrill scream
of an ambulance siren startled me into sudden movement.
Even as I ran out the doorway I seemed to know what I’d find: the crowd
huddling around the figure sprawled in the dust under the hot sun. Old men tire
easily in such heat, and once the heart goes—
Jimmy Rogers looked very much as though he were smiling in his sleep as
they lifted him into the ambulance. And I was glad of that; at least he’d died with
his illusions intact.
“Just keeled over during the scene—one minute he was standing there, and
the next—”
They were still chattering and gabbling when I walked away, walked back be¬
hind the fort and into the bunkhouse.
The letter was gone.
I’d dropped it on the mattress, and it was gone. That’s all I can say about it.
Maybe somebody else happened by while I was out front, watching them take
Jimmy away. Maybe a gust of wind carried it through the doorway, blew it across
the desert in a hot Santa Ana gust. Maybe there was no letter. You can take your
choice—all I can do is state the facts.
And there aren’t very many more facts to state.
I didn’t go to Jimmy Rogers’ funeral, if indeed he had one. I don’t even know
where he was buried: probably the Motion Picture Fund took care of him.
Whatever those facts may be, they aren’t important.
For a few days I wasn’t too interested in facts. I was trying to answer a few
abstract questions about metaphysics—reincarnation, heaven and hell, the dif¬
ference between real life and reel life. I kept thinking about those images of ac-
Blaise Cendrars
701
tual people indulging in make-believe. But even after they die, the make-believe
goes on, and that’s a form of reality too. I mean, where’s the borderline? And
if there is a borderline—is it possible to cross over? Life’s but a walking shadow —
Shakespeare said that, but I wasn’t sure what he meant.
I’m still not sure, but there’s just one more fact I must state.
The other night, for the first time in all the months since Jimmy Rogers died,
I went back to the Silent Movie.
They were playing Intolerance, one of Griffith’s greatest. Way back in 1916
he built the biggest set ever shown on the screen—the huge temple in the Baby¬
lonian sequence.
One shot never fails to impress me, and it did so now; a wide angle on the
towering temple, with thousands of people moving antlike amid the gigantic
carvings and colossal statues. In the distance, beyond the steps guarded by rows
of stone elephants, looms a mighty wall, its top covered with tiny figures. You
really have to look closely to make them out. But I did look closely, and this
time I can swear to what I saw.
One of the extras, way up there on the wall in the background, was a smil¬
ing girl with long blond curls. And standing right beside her, one arm around
her shoulder, was a tall old man with white whiskers. I wouldn’t have noticed
either of them, except for one thing.
They were waving at me . . .
Blaise Cendkafls
Blaise Cendrars (188J—1961) was a French poet and writer who came to live in Los An¬
geles and wrotefetchingly about it in the 1930s. His charming book Hollywood: Mecca
of the Movies, with Bemelmanesgue drawings by Jean Guerin, regarded the scene with
a bemused enthusiasm. Here he conducts a tour of the main gates to the major studios,
succeeding at the same time in describing how each studio has its own personality and aura.
7 o 2 Hollywood
Tke Famous Corner of
Hollywood & Vine
“If You Want to Make Movies . .
If You Want to Make Movies, Come to Hollywood:
BUT UNLESS YOU PAY THE PRICE, YOU Won't SUCCEED!
When you get off the train in Los Angeles, you’re practically thrown into the
street!
Los Angeles has many beautiful skyscrapers, but the big city’s train station is
plainly insufficient. The long transcontinental trains slow to a stop and shove off
again in the street. Thus, from the second you step out of your coach, you enter
at ground level into the jumbled racket of trams, buses, and taxis.
Grab whichever one of these passing vehicles, toss the driver an address, race
off, or head out on foot; from that moment on I defy you not to feel lost in the
streets, above all if, like so many others, you’ve made your way to Hollywood
with the hope of some day making movies.
In Hollywood, all roads lead . . . to a studio! So, at whatever pace you want
Blaise Cendrars
7°3
to walk and no matter which direction you choose or how much time you take
to get your bearings, any one of these streets intersecting in front of you and
taking off in straight lines to the East, to the West, to the South, to the North,
ends fatally at a wall.
This wall is the famous Great Wall of China that surrounds every studio and
that makes Hollywood, already a difficult city to conquer, a true forbidden
city—actually, either better or worse than that, since Hollywood is comprised
of many interior barriers encircling numerous kremlins and defending access to
dozens of seraglios, and I believe it is not only because of the radiance of the
stars and the attraction they exert the world over that we have baptized Holly¬
wood (where the advertising slogan is: Hollywood, where the stars shine day and night )
Mecca of the Movies, but, strictly speaking, above all because the entrances to
these studios are nearly impassable for the noninitiate, as if, really, to wish to
make your way into a studio is to want to force entry into the Holy of Holies.
So, if you want to make movies in Hollywood, come on! . . . but announce
it with a maximum of publicity, create a sensation, otherwise, unless you’re will¬
ing to pay the price, you’ll never get through, for there is the wall.
The Break in the Wall
This wall, which surrounds every studio, is pierced by one small opening where,
without fail, there is a crowd, since all other outlets in the enclosure are barri¬
caded, grilled over, bolted, closed.
This tiny opening, this narrow, half-open door leads into a corridor or an¬
techamber where you will find the blessed studio entrance through which so
many long to slip.
But before being allowed to step across the threshold and push, heart pound¬
ing, through the turnstile that lets you in and chimes wickedly behind your back
upon registering your entry, you are required, no matter who you are, to stand
in a long line at a window open in the back wall, into which is embedded the
anonymous head of a Pharisee, a head that belongs to the Cerberus of the
place.
Head? What am I saying! This gatekeeper, now barking, now whispering into
the telephone, no matter how many copies of him have been turned out, no
matter what his type—brutal, a killjoy, sad, impassive, breezy, crafty, ill-
tempered, cold, exaggeratedly polite, bewildered, a dimwit, narrow-minded,
mean, dreamy or smiling—this monster of hypocrisy always made me think,
every time, of what I would like to have done to him (which is why I had to
watch myself), to this guardian of pagan hell, who, as everyone knows, was a
704
Hollywood
Entrance to the Studios (Universal) —
Helen Westey
dog with three heads: the first always raised to the sky, howling at the moon,
the second, with glowering eyes, slavering, foaming at the mouth, and snarling
ceaselessly, the third, whom no one trusts because she’s always cringing and
pretending to be asleep, given to sudden lunges so as to bite from behind the
ankles of the damned as they pass by. . . . And, actually, it was the damned that
these passersby standing around at the studio gates made me think about, wait¬
ing patiently without ever losing heart for a message from inside or the good¬
will of a lying gatekeeper who just wants to be rid of them, all of these com¬
mon folk ofhumble means, but enthusiasts of the cinema keeping the faith; men,
women, boys, girls, little children flocked from every city in the world to wait
in attendance at the gates to the underworld of this artificial paradise of the
movies!
Blaise Cendrars
7 °i
The Pharisees
Dante placed above the gate that descends into the regions of hell the famous
inscription: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here ...”
In Hollywood they’re a lot more brief, a lot more direct, a lot more cynical.
They’re not hampered by having to come up with a beautiful phrase. They tell
people exactly what they feel the need to tell them, and not being able to tell
them brutally enough in four letters, they let them know it in three words. They
post above the door, for the benefit of those who insist on wanting to come in,
a placard: Do not enter. That’s it, period. So much the worse for those who don’t
understand, so much the worse for those who end up cracking their noses or
breaking bones, and so much the worse, or so much the better, for those who
finally succeed in getting through. We’ll see soon enough what will happen to
them then!
At Universal
So it is that at the entrance to Universal Films, beneath the window occupied
by a dummy representative of Cerberus, whose head my friend Jean Guerin
knew how to draw so well (it’s a fairly prevalent type among the common herd
in America), a sign is nailed up that reads: It’s useless to wait. — It’s useless to in¬
sist. — You’re wasting your time.—Recommendations won’t get you anywhere.—This
place was not meant for you.—Do not enter.
With that, you’ve been warned.
But as Carl Laemmle, the president of this company, had in any case launched
a frenzied publicity campaign in the newspapers, printing notices signed in his
name in which he personally asks the public to please be so kind as to collabo¬
rate with him by sending in observations, comments, suggestions, promising
to pay from $jo to $ i oo in cash if one of the submitted ideas was accepted, it
was perhaps at the gate of Universal that the most suckers were cooling their
heels.
These poor folks may not have understood anything of the gatekeeper’s os¬
tracizing them, but I’ll swear between us that this sort of shriveled chameleon
playing dumb always feigned not to know who we were talking about when we
gave him one of the names of the company’s bosses, and even when we handed
him an urgent, signed notice, he played the innocent and claimed not to know
where it came from!
706
Hollywood
The Window (Universal)
At Paramount
At Paramount, the whole team that works the window is of the boxing kind.
They’re young, beefy fellows, quick on their feet, and very determined. And
they’re not in “sports” for nothing! If your name is Durand, they announce Mr.
Dupont, and if you ask to be put in contact with a Mr. Adam, they coolly ad¬
dress you to a Mr. Cook.
One day, one of these young swashbucklers who had made me spell three
times not “Constantinople,” but my name, and who had noted it correctly right
in front of me, C-e-n-d-r-a-r-s, had the effrontery to announce to a starlet who
Blaise Cendrars
707
was waiting for me, thinking I wouldn’t catch the name he was conjuring on the
telephone, “that a certain Mr. Wilson wanted to see her”!
You have to believe that such con games are in wide use at this firm, and that
this chamber of lunatic concierges had the run of the place, because every time
a Paramount department head makes an appointment with you he’s obliged to
come down himself or to send his secretary to fill out an entrance pass in ad¬
vance, a simple phone call from him not being enough to cut through the tem¬
peramental moods of the boxers. Anyway, this piece of paper is often found
having gone astray by the time you present yourself at the window at the ap¬
propriate hour, which is exactly what happened to me on another day when
Charles Boyer, who could spare but one short hour for lunch, died of both bore¬
dom and hunger while waiting for me in the studio commissary, as a young
preoccupied athlete who had misplaced my entrance permit suggested I apply
myself to the instructions he had from Cerberus, who wasn’t about to permit
anyone to enter! I had to parley for three-quarters of an hour and unsettle
twenty people before winning my case, which was just to get in . . . and go about
finding Charles Boyer, who ended up taking off without eating, since he had run
out of time.
At United Artists
At United Artists, the window clerk is not only a completely different type from
the young boxers in training at Paramount, he is also from another generation
and even of an entirely different social extraction, as befits this right-minded firm,
the most distinguished in the world of cinema and the only one in Hollywood
to dabble in refinement and civility.
It is, accordingly, a gracious man who assists me when I show up, a distin¬
guished gentleman with grand, patronizing gestures, and this dear man is in such
a hurry to accommodate me that he can’t even wait for me to form a thought
or pronounce a name before he has already pushed a button and the door opens
in front of me. As I begin to move forward, this gentleman-Cerberus rises and
accompanies me three steps, the better to clarify the directions he gives me. I
am overwhelmed, beside myself with thank yous.
There’s no doubt about it, I follow his instructions to the letter: South Court¬
yard, Building 39, Corridor B, Stairway 111, 1st Floor, Office 13 . . . and
when I arrive at my destination, I enter an office, heated of course, with a red
rose in a vase, cigarettes, matches, a ream of white paper, exquisitely sharp¬
ened pencils, the day’s newspapers, an office without one particle of dust, but
an office in which there is absolutely no one and in which the telephone is deaf-
mute!
708 Hollywood
Restaurant (Universal) — Lunch with
Cendrars: Ed Arnold, Pin hi To mkin,
Helen Westey, etc.
I went back three times to this imperturbable straight-faced joker from United
Artists, and each time he spun me onto the same outrageous course. Now that
I think of it, this didn’t really surprise me that much because at first sight I had
thought there was something fishy about this gentleman, with his head like some
old saint in an almanac which ought to have been bearded and covered with hair
but which had in fact just been sheared with an electric razor and then polished,
something that was stupefying, comic, inconceivable, even for an alien, but it
Americanized him in a way that was somehow extremely suspect.
The third time, realizing that all of this blasted wag’s directions were false,
I thought it was hilarious and took advantage of the situation by going on an ad¬
venture through these vast studios that house a dozen or so enterprises, among
them Mary Pickford’s company.
The offices pertaining to this latter, into which I glanced indiscreetly in pass¬
ing, were composed of a series of daintily furnished rooms draped in Liberty
print cloth, with spinsters leaning over their typewriters as if over sewing ma¬
chines (Mary Pickford is now Hollywood’s lady patroness) and a darling little
Blaise Cendrars
709
white doggie, no bigger than a ball of wool, splashed onto the carpet like a cream
puff from a tea table.
It was also on that day that I encountered, coming around the comer of a
building and slipping furtively into a courtyard, Douglas Fairbanks, whom the
newspapers had announced was still in Cannes and whom I surprised returning
incognito to this establishment, which was his at one time and perhaps still is,
half of it anyway. The two of us, buttoned into our raincoats, collars up, hats
cocked over our eyes on account of the rain, we had the air of a couple of thieves.
Having passed by quickly without really noticing me, he turned around to see
who I was, but didn’t recognize me . . . and as for me, I didn’t run after him to
shake his hand, figuring that Doug didn’t want to have been sighted. . . .
At M.G.M.
At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the first time I went there, hundreds of Japanese
sailors were blocking the corridor. Clearing a path for myself among them, I
thought I was plowing through a bunch of uniformed extras. But I was wrong,
that’s how you’ll get fooled every step of the way in the free-for-all of the Hol¬
lywood studios, because you never really know if the person whose feet you have
just stepped on is a real or a phoney character, least of all when that person is
wearing a uniform or is decorated.
But sure enough, my Japanese mariners were the real thing, bona fide sailors.
They were on shore leave from a battle cruiser of the Imperial Navy and had
come to make a tour of Hollywood, and they all wanted to see—I heard this
with my own ears when it was almost my turn to approach the window—
“the Missus Roma and the Mista Djuliet\" M.G.M. having been filming just then
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with the blazing Norma Shearer in the starring
role.
Now, everyone knows that this star is a capricious creature who can’t stand
the presence of the least stranger on the set when she’s filming because it makes
her nervous and drains her of all her powers.
Which is to say that the Japanese were getting very upset and that the Cer¬
berus at hand ought to have had a hundred reasons to be frazzled that morning.
Absolutely not! This extraordinarily cool and prodigiously dextrous man, a ver¬
itable Cerberus-virtuoso, astounded me, for he certainly had a lot more guts than
Napoleon, and the number of people he was in the midst of executing when it
came my turn to meet him flooded me with admiration.
It’s said that Napoleon dictated his mail to ten secretaries at once; the gate-
7io
Hollywood
keeper at he spoke into and answered eleven telephoned at once. He
had a thicket of receivers in each hand, Japanese harassing him in gibberish, and
if he was patched in to Norma Shearer or to someone on her general staff, they
were saying god only knows what on the other end, and surely things that were
none too pleasant for him—none of which kept him from asking me (he had a
very strong German accent) what it was I wanted and, what rapture! from
putting me immediately in touch with Mr. Vogel, Mr. Robert M. W. Vogel him¬
self, chief of international publicity and the man I actually wanted to see, and
not some Mr. Levy, a name they spell Lavee over there, not for camouflage but
in accordance with local pronunciation.
As it was the only time I was received right away in Hollywood, I have often
asked myself since whether or not it was due to an error or to some happy co¬
incidence, or if, in this powerful German-American trust,* good practical sense
and German order weren’t in the process—since a solid native accent cuts
through the fluent English of most of this company’s employees—of exerting
pressure, of reducing the complications, the nonsense, the red tape of a med¬
dlesome and bureaucratic administration, and of setting a famous example of
efficiency and energy for the American organization, so often frivolous, wan¬
ton, or full of gaps, or else which runs in neutral, is an inhuman luxury, pure
technicality, an art for art’s sake.
And if I tell you that I asked around and discovered that this Cerberus-
virtuoso was a young Nazi fresh off the boat from Germany, would we be able
to draw certain conclusions?
Maybe so . . .
♦Since M.G.M. does not seem to have been owned even in part by a German concern, one can only presume that
this was yet another tongue-in-cheek embellishment.
Gore Vidal
For Hollywood royalty in the 1930s, one of the perks was an invitation to ride on William
Randolph Hearst’s private trainfrom Los Angeles up to a siding near Hearst’s San Simeon,
the vast architectural curiosity that inspired Welles’s Xanadu. The train remained parked
Gore Vidal
7 11
while the guestsfinished their night’s sleep, and then a brealfast buffet was served before
cars ferried them to San Simeon for a weekend’s entertainment. Gore Vidal re-creates some
of that life in Hollywood, a historical novel that seems more based on fact than most
books in the genre and that here re-creates a time when San Simeon was still on the draw¬
ing boards.
from Hollywood
I
Caroline lay tied to the railroad track, the hot sun in her face while in her ears
the ominous sound of an approaching steam engine. A high male voice called
out, “Look frightened.”
“I am frightened.”
“Don’t talk. Look more to the left.”
“But, Chief, she’s got too much shadow on her face. You can’t see the eyes.”
“Look straight ahead.” The slow-moving steam engine was now within a yard
of her. She could see it out of the comer of her right eye. The engineer stared
down at her, hand on—what?—the brake she prayed. A stone pressed into her
back, just below the left shoulder blade. She wanted to scream.
“Scream!” shouted William Randolph Hearst; and Caroline obliged. As she
filled the air with terrified exhalation, a man on horseback rode up to the rail¬
road engine and leapt into the engine room, where he pulled a cord, releasing
a quantity of ill-smelling steam from the engine’s smoke-stack. As the train
ground to a halt, he ran toward Caroline and knelt beside her.
“Cut!” said the Chief. “Stay right where you are, Mrs. Sanford.”
“I have no choice,” said Caroline. The sweaty young man—a cowboy be¬
longing to Hearst’s ranch—smiled down at her reassuringly. “It won’t take a
minute, ma’am,” he said. “He’s got to change the camera so he can get a real
close look at me untying you.”
“Why doesn’t he just show a card on the screen, with the information that
two weeks after Lady Belinda’s eleventh-hour rescue she was home again in Lon¬
don, pouring tea. I think I can do that rather well.”
Hearst was now standing over her, his vast bulk mercifully blocking the sun.
“That was swell. Really,” he said. “Joe’s rolling up the camera now. It won’t
take a minute. I never knew you were such a pro.”
“Neither,” said Caroline, “did I."
“Actually, there’s nothing easier than movies,” said Millicent Hearst, whom
712
Hollywood
Caroline had known since she was the younger partner of a vaudeville sister act.
“Either you look nice on the screen or you don’t. If you do, they’ll love you. If
you don’t you can act your butt off and nothing’s going to happen.”
“You’re certainly very effective on the screen.” Caroline spoke brightly, still
flat on her back, with the dusty cowboy to one side of her while, to the other,
Mr. and Mrs. Hearst gazed down on her, observing the social amenities with a
flow of good talk.
“Actually if Millicent weren’t so old, I could make a star out of her.” Hearst
was his usual kindly, tactless self.
“I’m not all that much older than Mary Pickford.” Millicent’s voice had never
ceased to be Hell’s Kitchen New York Irish. “But it’s a mug’s game, acting, and
the hours they keep here in the movies you wouldn’t believe.”
“But I do. In fact, one of those hours has passed,” said Caroline, “since I was
tied up.”
“We’re ready,” said Joe Hubbell, the cameraman, just out of Caroline’s
range.
“All right. Let’s get started.” The Hearsts withdrew. The cowboy and Car¬
oline waited, patiently, to be told what to do. As they did, Caroline admired,
yet again, Hearst’s instinct, which had now drawn him to the most exciting of
all the games that their country had yet devised. As he had invented “yellow jour¬
nalism,’’which obliged reality to mirror not itself but Hearst’s version of it, now
he had plunged into movie-making, both amateur like this film and professional
like the Hearst-produced The Perils of Pauline, the most successful serial of 1913.
Now in summer residence at San Simeon, a quarter-million-acre ranch to the
north of Hollywood, the Chief was amusing himself with a feature-length film
in which he had gallantly starred his houseguest, Caroline, who was several years
older than Millicent, and by no means as conventionally pretty. Once Caroline
had accepted George Creel’s assignment to be the Administration’s emissary to
the moving-picture business, she had started her embassy by paying a call on her
old friend Hearst, who disapproved of the war in general and Wilson in partic¬
ular. Nevertheless, he was most lavishly a host not to mention meticulously a
director.
An hour later, Caroline, no longer Lady Belinda, was freed from her track
by the cowboy, whom she was directed to kiss full on the lips. He had blushed
furiously, and she had been intrigued to find how soft a young man’s lips could
be, not that she had had much experience with young men or, for that matter,
old, she also noted that he smelled, powerfully, of sweating horse.
Caroline and her maid, Heloise, shared a tent close to the wooden house of
the Hearsts atop Camp Hill. Since there were always a dozen houseguests as well
as an army of servants, gardeners, ranchhands, the hill was now a city of tem¬
porary tents, surrounding the elaborate wooden house, which was taken down
in winter and put up in summer.
Gore Vidal
7i3
“And here, right here,” said Hearst, “I’m going to build a castle, just like the
one you and Blaise have at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc.”
They were seated in the Chief s principal sitting room, with its rough-hewn
beams and unfinished pine walls on which were hung perhaps the largest col¬
lection of false old masters that any American millionaire had ever accumulated.
But then it was always said of Hearst that after thirty years of the wholesale buy¬
ing of art, he could always tell a good fake from a bad one; and of the world’s
forgeries, he chose, invariably, the ones with the most accurate brushwork. “He
has,” the art merchant Duveen was supposed to have said, “an excellent cocked-
»
eye.
While Caroline drank sherry, Hearst stood over a round table on which was
placed what looked to be a wedding cake covered with velvet. Like a matador,
he removed the covering to reveal the model of a castle with two towers, all
meticulously detailed in plaster. “This is it,” he said. “What I’m going to build
up here.”
“It is,” Caroline was guarded, “like nothing else.”
“Nothing else in California, anyway. Can’t wait to get started.” Hearst’s
major-domo of twenty years, George Thompson, was now as round as an owl
and as rosy as a piglet; for more than twenty years he had appeared at the same
hour with Coca-Cola in a silver-embossed mug for the Chief; and now sherry
for Caroline. “Good evening, Mrs. Sanford.” She smiled upon him. After all, it
was George who encouraged the Chief to traffic with fashionables like herself
in addition to the Chief s own preference, politicians and theater folk, while the
friendly Millicent tended to keep her distance from her husband’s friends. She
preferred New York to California; motherhood to glamour; respectability to
Hearstian fame; and Roman Catholic strictness to Protestant easiness. She was
said to be quite aware that she had been superseded in the Chief s affections by
a showgirl, who was either twenty years old or seventeen; if the latter, she was
the same age that Millicent had been when she and her sister had danced their
way off the stage of the Herald Square Theater, where they had been two of the
many maidens in The Girl from Paris, and into Hearst’s great heart. Now history
was repeating itself with Miss Marion Davies, the daughter of a Brooklyn politi¬
cian named Bernard Douras. Blaise had approved the Tribune story of the ro¬
mance, which Caroline had read with delight and promptly spiked as a Matter
of Taste, all important for the Tribune as the war-time President’s favorite Wash¬
ington newspaper now that Ned McLean’s Post was known as “the court circu¬
lar.” Actually, the vaudeville-loving President would probably have enjoyed
very much the highly suggestive but never absolutely libellous story of the young
showgirl for whom the fifty-year-old Hearst had, if not forsaken his wife, aban¬
doned her to the rigors of respectable domesticity while he squired, without
cigarettes, alcohol or bad language, his chorus girl through the only slightly
subdued night life of wartime New York. Miss Davies had left her convent—
7>4
Hollywood
always a convent, Blaise had decreed—when a mere girl to join the chorus of
Chu Chin Chow, Oh, Boy! and now her apotheosis in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1917.
There were whispers at San Simeon that when the Missis left, the Miss would
arrive. But Hearst was silent on all personal matters; and Millicent seemed un¬
perturbed.
“So George Creel wants you to organize the movie business.” Hearst sat in a
throne opposite Caroline while George lit the kerosene lamps. The electricity
at San Simeon was home-made and unreliable. “Stories about Huns raping Bel¬
gian nuns?”
“Surely your papers have told us all that we want to hear on that subject.”
Caroline was smooth, relaxed by sherry. “1 thought, perhaps, Huns raped by Bel¬
gian nuns, to encourage women to resist the beast.”
“I always said,” Hearst did not even smile, “thatjou were the newspaperman,
not Blaise.”
“Well, I did buy the Tribune, and I made it popular by copying faithfully your
Journal .”
“No. You’ve got a better paper. Better town, too. Particularly now. I’m
thinking. . . . You know, Creel worked for me on the Journal. Ambitious.
Movies.” Hearst stared at a Mantegna whose wooden frame sported wormholes
only down one side; thanks to Hearst’s usual haste, there had been no time for
the forger to drill holes in the rest of the frame. “I think movies are the answer.”
“To what?”
“The world.” Hearst’s glaring eagle eyes were fixed on Caroline and the hair
that had been blond when they first met was now gray. “I always thought it was
going to be the press. So simple to print. So simple to transmit with telegraph.
But there’s the language problem. By the time Jamie Bennett’s stolen all our
stories for his Paris Herald, the news is old hat. The beauty of the movies is they
don’t talk. Just a few cards in different languages to tell you what the plot is,
what they’re saying. Everyone in China watches my Perils of Pauline, but they
can’t read any of my papers there.”
“You’re going in?”
Hearst nodded. “I do this for fun, what we did today. Though if it looks okay,
I’ll distribute it. I’ve got my own company. You don’t mind?”
“I’d be thrilled, of course.” Of all professions that Caroline had ever day¬
dreamed of for herself that of actress had not been one. As a girl, she had been
taken by her father back-stage to see Sarah Bernhardt; and the sweat, the dirt,
the terror had impressed itself upon her in a way that the splendor of what the
public saw from the front of the stage had not. As for movie-acting, Millicent,
an old showgirl, had grasped it all. Either the camera favored you or it did not.
At forty, Caroline assumed that she would look just that; after all, there were,
officially at least, no leading ladies of forty. She herself was interested only in
Gore Vidal
7 i 5
the business end of the movies; she had also been commissioned to investigate
the propaganda possibilities of this unexpected popular novelty. It had not been
until such movie favorites as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks had taken
to the market-place and sold Liberty Bonds to millions of their fans that the gov¬
ernment had realized how potent were the inventors of Hollywood; and Creel
had agreed.
But Hearst, as usual, was idiosyncratic. “Distribution companies, theater
chains, those are what matter. The rest is a bit like the theater, a gamble. Ex-
ceptyou almost can’tlose money on afilm unless somebody like the director—
what’s his name—the two girls, the initials?”
“D. W. Griffith.” Caroline knew all the names from her own paper.
“Decides he wants to make the biggest movie in the world by spending the
most money, building things like all of Babylon. I hear he’s broke. And Trian¬
gle wants to sell out. I’ve made a bid. But Zukor and Lasky have got more cash
than I do—in hand, that is. This business is like a cornucopia, like Alaska in ’49.
A million dollars just for Mary Pickford. Incredible. Only danger is these Grif¬
fith types. Stage-door johnnies who start to think big once you give them a cam¬
era to play with. Though,” the thin lips widened into a smile, “it is the best fun
there is, making a movie. Sort of like a printer’s block, the way you can keep
rearranging all the pieces. But without a paper’s deadline. You can keep at it
until you get all the pieces in the right order. They call that part—just like we
do—editing. Then it just doesn’t lie there dead on the page, it moves.”
“Let’s sell our papers and go to Southern California.” Caroline was always
easily fired by Hearst.
“If I were younger I would. But,” Hearst frowned, “there’s New York.”
“That’s right. Didn’t we endorse you for mayor, this fall?”
Hearst’s face was blank. “The Tribune, on orders from Wilson I expect, has
told me to tend to my papers, and support the incumbent, the hopeless John
Purroy Mitchel.”
Caroline was all mock wide-eyed innocence. “That must be our new edito¬
rial writer . . .”
“That was my old friend Blaise. You must’ve missed the issue. Anyway, I’ve
got Murphy. I’ve got Tammany. So if I win . . .”
“You’ll be the Democratic candidate for president in 1920.”
“And the president in 1921, when I take the oath of office. It’s about time,
don’t you think?”
Caroline had never understood Hearst’s ambition other than to suspect that
there was, simply, nothing more to it than sheer energy. “I have never known
an election when there were so many candidates so early, and so—so
unashamed.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of.” He rinsed his teeth noisily in Coca-Cola. “The
7 i 6 Hollywood
people don’t like third terms. They also don’t like Wilson. Roosevelt’s a wreck
and a spoiler and the people are tired of him. McAdoo . . .” He paused.
“James Burden Day?” Loyally, Caroline said the name, which did not inter¬
est Hearst. “Champ Clark?” The Speaker of the House was the leading Bryan-
ite; and already at work. “And those are just the Democrats.”
“The Republicans will nominate Roosevelt, who’s done for, or Leonard
Wood, who I can do in any day of the week. He’s a general,” Hearst added with
disdain.
“So is Pershing, and when we win . . .”
“There won’t be a general on any ballot. Remember what I say. This war’s
too big. The ordinary man hates officers, West Pointers particularly. Every man
who’s gone through training will want to get back at the men who gave him such
a hard time.”
“Why wasn’t this true in the other wars?”
“Well, it was true in my little war against Spain. I don’t count Roosevelt, who
was already a politician when he rode up that hill with my best reporters cov¬
ering him. The true war candidate—back then—should’ve been Dewey. Dewey
of Manila. Dewey the conquering hero. So whathappened? Nothing.”
“He was stupid.”
“That’s usually no drawback. Anyway, this time something called selective
service is going to crowd the military out. These boys aren’t volunteers for this
war. They’re being taken captive to go fight alongside people they hate, like the
English, or against their own people.”
“Your Irish and German supporters?”
“You bet. Or if they’re just ordinary buckwheat Americans they won’t know
where they are once they’re in Europe, or why they’re supposed to be mad at
something called the Kaiser. That means when they get back, if they get back,
they’re going to blame Wilson and their officers for the whole mess. You know,
you ought to put some flags on your frontpage. There’s this new color process.
Good red. Pretty good blue. Looks nice and cheery. Patriotic. People like it.”
Caroline had always regarded Hearst as a mindless genius; or an idiot savant;
or something simply not calculable by the ordinary criteria of intelligence. Yet
there was no getting round the preciseness and practicality of his instincts, in¬
cluding his occasional odd forays into socialism. Recently he had convinced
Tammany Hall of the necessity of municipal ownership of public utilities. If such
a thing were to come to pass and if Hearst were to become president, the en¬
tire Senate, at his inauguration, would converge upon him and strike him down,
like Caesar, in the name of those sacred trusts that had paid f or their togas.
Twenty sat down to dinner in a long timbered room hung with Aubusson ta¬
pestries. On the table huge crystal girandoles alternated with bottles of tomato
ketchup and Worcestershire sauce. Caroline sat on the Chiefs right in defer-
Gore Vidal
717
ence to her high place as a fellow publisher. Seated on Caroline’s right, at her
request, was Timothy X. Farrell, the successful director of ten—or was it
twenty—photoplays in the last two years. Farrell had come to see Hearst on se¬
cret business, which Caroline had quickly discovered involved a screen career
for Marion Davies and a new production company for Hearst, who had also just
acquired, he told Caroline, casually, the Pathe Company from its war-
beleaguered French owners.
Farrell was thin and dark and nearer thirty than forty; spoke with a Boston
Irish brogue; had been to Holy Cross when he had got the call to make movies
at Flushing, New York. He had moved on to Santa Monica, California, where
he had worked as a carpenter and general handyman for Thomas Ince. Now he
was a successful director, noted for his use of light. Caroline was in a new world
of jargon, not unlike—but then again not very like—journalism. Farrell was
touchingly eager to make films celebrating the United States, freedom, democ¬
racy, while attacking, of course, the bestial Hun, monarchy and the latest hor¬
ror, Bolshevism, now emerging from the ruins of czarist Russia and connected
closely, Creel maintained, with various American labor unions, particularly
those that sought to reduce the work day from twelve to eight hours.
“What we need is a story,” said Farrell. “You can’t just start shooting away,
like the Chief. He’s old-fashioned. He thinks Perils of Pauline is the latest in the
movies. But it isn’t. That serial’s four years old. Four years is like a century in
the movies. Everything’s different now. The audience won’t pay their dollars—
or even nickels—to see just anything that moves on a sheet. But they’ll pay as
much as two dollars for a real story, and a real spectacle. Griffith changed every¬
thing.”
“You, too,” Caroline remembered to flatter. A film director was no differ¬
ent from a senator.
“Well, I got lucky last year. Missy Drugget had the biggest gross of any film
for the year, in the States.” Farrell frowned. “That’s another problem with this
war. Our overseas distributors—crooks all of them to begin with, but now
there’s a war they can really cheat us, and they do. Goldstein was going to do
something about it. But now I guess he’s going to jail.”
“Who’s Goldstein, and why jail?”
"Spirit of’76. Remember? About the American Revolution? Came out just be¬
fore April, before we were in the war. Well, your friends in Washington
thought,” there seemed to be no sarcasm in Farrell’s naturally urgent voice, “that
any mention of our own revolution was an insult to our ally, England. You know
it might confuse our simple folks to be told how we once had this war with Eng¬
land so that we could be a free country. Anyway, under one of the new laws,
the government went and indicted Bob Goldstein, the producer, and they say
he’s going to get ten years in prison.”
7i 8 Hollywood
“Just for making a movie about how we became a free country?”
Farrell seemed without irony, but his voice was hard. “Free to put anyone—
everyone—in jail. Yes.”
“Why hasn’t the press taken this up?”
“Ask Mr. Hearst. Ask yourself.” The eyes were arctic blue with black lashes
and brows.
“What is the exact charge against Goldstein?”
“I don’t know. But it’s all covered by the . . . what’s its name? Espionage
Act, which didn’t even exist when we made the picture.”
“Your picture, too?”
Farrell flushed. “Yes. Me, too. I did the lighting and camera work as a favor.
But they don’t go after the small fry. Now, I’m working with Triangle. They’re
the group that Mr. Ince did Civilization with. He’s a friend of Mr. Hearst, which
is how I happen to be here, I guess.”
“Will Mr. Ince be arrested, too?” Caroline remembered that Ince’s Civiliza¬
tion had been a pacifist film. Since Hearst not only had been against the war but
was considered pro-German, Caroline suspected a connection between the anti¬
war films of some of the best movie-makers and Hearst himself. In fact, Hearst
had been so anti-Allies that the British and French governments had denied his
newspapers the use of their international cables. In a fit of over-excitement,
Canada had banned all of Hearst’s newspapers and should a Canadian be caught
reading so much as the Katzenjammer Kids comic pages, he could be impris¬
oned for five years.
“Idoubtit. He has connections. He knows the President. But I’ll bet he wishes
he’d stuck to ‘westerns.’ ”
After dinner, Hearst led them into a tent that served as a theater; and here
he showed them a western of his own making, Romance of the Rancho. The hero
was Hearst, looking rather bulkier than his giant horse; the heroine was Milli-
cent, who sat next to Caroline during the performance, complaining bitterly
about her appearance. “I look like a Pekingese. It’s awful, seeing yourself like
this.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Caroline, who was attracted to the idea of film not
as an art or as light or as whatever one wanted to call so collective and vulgar a
storytelling form but as a means of preserving time, netting the ephemeral and
the fugitive—there it is! now, it’s past, gone forever. Millicent, now, was seated
beside her, face illuminated by the flickering light upon the screen while, on the
screen, one saw Millicent then, weeks ago—whenever, unchanging and un¬
changeable forever.
As applause for Romance of the Rancho ended, Hearst stood up and gave a mock
bow, and said, “I wrote the title cards, too. Couldn’t be easier. Just like picture
captions.” He looked at Caroline. “Now we’ll see something that’s still in the
Gore Vidal
719
works. A super western epic.” The lights went out. A beam of light from the
projector was aimed at the screen, which suddenly filled with a picture of
Hearst’s train-of-all-work coming to a halt. Caroline recognized the sweaty
cowboy with whom she had worked that day. Obviously he was much used in
Hearst’s home movies. She was struck at how startlingly handsome his some¬
what—in life—square, crude face became on the screen. She noted, too, that
his eyebrows grew together in a straight line, like those of an archaic Minoan
athlete.
There was a murmur in the tent as a slender woman got off the train. She
was received by the cowboy, hat in hand. A porter then gave him her suitcase.
The camera was now very close on the woman’s face: a widow’s peak and a cleft
chin emphasized the symmetry of her face, high cheekbones made flattering shad¬
ows below large eyes. Slowly, the woman smiled. There was a sigh from the
audience.
“Jesus Christ,” murmured Millicent, now all Hell’s Kitchen Irish, “ain’t you
the looker!”
“I don’t believe it.” And Caroline did not. A title card said, “Welcome to
Dodge City, Lady Belinda.”
Then the cowboy and Lady Belinda walked toward a waiting buggy; and Car¬
oline stared at herself, mesmerized. But this was no longer herself. This was her¬
self of two weeks ago; hence, two weeks younger than she now was. Yet here
she was, aged forty, forever, and she scrutinized the screen for lines and found
them only at the edge of the eyes—mascara could hide the worst, she thought
automatically. Then as she smiled what she always took to be her most trans¬
parently insincere smile of greeting, usually produced in honor of a foreign dig¬
nitary or the president of the moment, she noted that Lady Belinda—she re¬
garded the woman on the screen as an entirely third person—looked ravishing
and ravished, and the only lines discernible in the bright sunlight were two del¬
icate brackets at the comers of her mouth. For twenty minutes the incomplete
film ran.
When the lights came on, Caroline was given a standing ovation, led by
Hearst. “We’ve got a brand-new star,” he said, sounding exactly like a Hearst
story from the entertainment page of the Journal, where a different chorus girl,
at least a half-dozen times a year, went on stage in the place of a stricken star,
and always triumphed and became the Toast of the Town.
Arthur Brisbane, Hearst’s principal editor, shook Caroline’s hand gravely.
“Even without blue eyes, you hold the screen.” Brisbane was notorious for his
theory that all great men and presumably women, too, were blue-eyed.
“Perhaps my eyes will fade to blue in the sun.” Caroline gave him her rav¬
ishing smile; and felt like someone possessed. She was two people. One who
existed up there on the screen, a figure from the past but now and forever im-
720
Hollywood
mutable, while the other stood in the center of a stuffy tent, rapidly aging with
each finite heartbeat entirely in the present tense, as she accepted congratula¬
tions.
“It’s a pity you aren’t younger,” said the merciless Millicent. “You could re¬
ally do something in pictures.”
“Lucky that I don’t want to, and so I can enjoy my middle age.”
The cameraman, Joe Hubbell, came up to her. “It was really my idea, stick¬
ing the film together like this. So you could see it.”
Hearst nodded. “We’ve Joe to thank. I never look through the camera lens
and I don’t see rushes. So when Joe kept telling me that Mrs. Sanford is really
something, I thought he was just being nice to the guests.”
“He was,” said Caroline. “He is.” She was thoroughly bemused and alarmed,
like one of those savages who believe that a photograph can steal away the soul.
After most of the guests had retired to their tents, Caroline and a chosen few
went back to Hearst’s wooden house, where George poured Coca-Cola, and
Caroline talked to Farrell about the uses of film for propaganda purposes. “I don’t
think you—or Mr. Creel—will have to do much arm-twisting. Everybody in
Hollywood does the same thing anyway, particularly now we’re in the war, and
you can go to jail if you criticize England or France or . . .”
“Our government. In order to make the world safe for democracy,” Caro¬
line parodied herself as an editorial writer, “we must extinguish freedom at
home.”
“That’s about it.” Farrell gave her a sharp look. “Personally, I don’t see much
choice between the Hun and the Espionage Act.”
“You are Irish, and hate England, and wish we had stayed out.” Caroline was
direct.
“Yes. But since I don’t want to join Bob Goldstein in the clink, I shall make
patriotic films about gallant Tommies, and ever-cheerful doughboys or hayseeds
or whatever we’ll call our boys.”
Caroline stared at Hearst across the room. He was in deep conversation with
a number of editors from various Hearst newspapers; or rather the editors, led
by Brisbane, were deeply conversing while their Chief listened enigmatically.
For the first time in her life, Caroline was conscious of true danger. Something
was shifting in this, to her, free and easy-going—too easy-going in some ways—
republic. Although she and Blaise had contributed to the war spirit—the Tri¬
bune was the first for going to war on the Allied side—she had not thought
through the consequences of what she had helped set in motion. She had learned
from Hearst that truth was only one criterion by which a story could be judged,
but at the same time she had taken it for granted that when her Tribune had played
up the real or fictitious atrocities of the Germans, Hearst’s many newspapers
had been dispensing equally pro-German sentiments. Each was a creator of
Gore Vidal
721
“facts” for the purpose of selling newspapers; each, also, had the odd bee in bon¬
net that could only be satisfied by an appearance in print. But now Hearst’s bee
was stilled. The great democracy had decreed that one could only have a single
view of a most complex war; otherwise, the prison was there to receive those
who chose not to conform to the government’s line, which, in turn, reflected
a spasm of national hysteria that she and the other publishers had so oppor¬
tunistically created, with more than usual assistance from home-grown politi¬
cal demagogues and foreign-paid propagandists. Now the Administration had
invited Caroline herself to bully the movie business into creating ever more sim¬
plistic rationales of what she had come, privately, despite her French bias, to
think of as the pointless war. Nevertheless, she was astonished that someone had
actually gone to prison for making a film. Where was the much-worshipped Con¬
stitution in all of this? Or was it never anything more than a document to be
used by the country’s rulers when it suited them and otherwise ignored? “Will
your friend Mr. Goldstein go to the Supreme Court?”
“I don’t think he has the money. Anyway, it’s war-time so there’s no free¬
dom of speech, not that there ever has been much.”
“You are too severe.” Caroline rallied to what was, after all, her native land.
“One can—or could—say—or write—almost anything.”
“You remember that picture with Nazimova? War Brides ? In 1916?”
“That was an exception.” In 1916 a modernized version of Lysistrata had so
enraged the pro-war lobby that it had been withdrawn.
“That was peace-time.”
“Well, no one went to jail.” Caroline’s response was weak. How oddly, how
gradually, things had gone wrong.
“It’ll be interesting if they get Mr. Hearst.”
“They’ve tried before. Remember when Colonel Roosevelt held him re¬
sponsible for President McKinley’s murder?”
“That was just peace-time politics. But now they can lock him up if he doesn’t
praise England and hit the Germans ...”
“And the Irish?” Caroline had got Farrell’s range. “For not coming to Eng¬
land’s aid?”
“Well . . .” Farrell accepted Coca-Cola from George. “Your friend Mr.
Creel’s moving fast. I’ve been invited to join the moving-picture division of his
committee, to work with the Army Signal Corps, to glorify our warriors.”
“But they haven’t done anything yet. Of course, when they do . . .”
“We’ll be ready. You’re very beautiful, you know.” As no one had said such
a thing to Caroline since she was nine years old, she had taken it for granted that
whatever beauty she might ever have had was, literally, unremarkable and so
unremarked.
“I think that you think,” she was precise in her ecstasy, “that my picture pro-
722
Hollywood
jected a dozen times life-size on a bedsheet is beautiful, which is not the same
thing as me.”
“No. It’s you, all right. I’m sorry. I have no manners.” He laughed, then
coughed. “My father kept a bar in Boston. In the South End.”
“Your manners are very agreeable. It’s your taste I question. But without zeal,
as the French say. At my age, I can endure quite a few compliments without los¬
ing my head.”
Caroline allowed Mr. Farrell to escort her to her tent, where, in the moon¬
light, to the howls of appreciative coyotes, a man not her lover kissed her. She
noted that his lips were far less soft and alluring than those of the Minoan cow¬
boy.
“Women are not destined to have everything,” she observed to Heloise, who
helped her undress. “Or, perhaps, anything.” But this sounded too neat; as well
as wrong. “I mean, anything that we really want.”
Budd Schulberg
Budd Schulberg’sfather was the pioneering movie producer B. P. Schulberg, and the son
had a first-row seat as he was coming of age in the Hollywood of the 1930s. He got his
first job at Paramount when he was seventeen, worked as a press agent and screenwriter,
and published hisfirst novel in 1941. It became an enduring Hollywood classic, a mer¬
ciless portrayal of an ambitious executive on the rise; the hero’s name, Sammy Glick, be¬
came shorthand for a type.
from What Makes Sammy Run?
You could see the beams of the giant searchlights ballyhooing Sammy’s preview
plowing broad white furrows through the sky. “There it is,” Sammy said as we
turned off Sunset toward the Village. The words came out of his mouth like hard,
sharp-sided pebbles. “Jesus.”
Budd Schulberg
723
He meant those lights up there were spelling Sammy Glick. There was no
other word for the sound of pride mouthed with apprehension. There wasn’t
much talking, Sammy’s mood always provided the backdrop for the rest of us,
and he was nervous. Even when he tried to cover it with wisecracks, they were
nervous wisecracks.
“What kind of a house is this?” he said.
“A tough one,” Kit said. “They only laugh when it’s funny, not when it’s sup¬
posed to be funny. And they never cry when it’s maudlin. Only when it’s pa¬
thetic.”
“Jesus,” Sammy said.
“And they're preview wise,” she warned. “They’ve had so many previews out
here that they all sound like little DeMilles. They complain about the angles,
and the smoothness of the dissolves, and they even tell you what to cut.”
“The bastards,” Sammy said, “they better think my picture is funny. I know
it’s funny. I counted the laughs myself. One hundred and seventeen.”
The theater entrance was full of excitement that came mostly from women
who were attracted to the leading man, and men resentful or regretful that they
would never go to bed with anybody like the star, and unimportant people who
idealized their envy into admiration and kids who wanted to have more auto¬
graphs than anybody else in the world.
All the lights were on in the theater and everybody in the audience had his
head turned toward the entrance. It looked crazy, as if the screen had suddenly
been set up behind their backs. They were all watching for the celebrities to fill
up the loge section that had been roped off for them. I realized why Sammy had
rushed us through dinner. He wanted to be sure and get there before the lights
went out.
The three of us started down the aisle together but we had only gone a cou¬
ple of rows when we lost Sammy. When I looked around, Sammy was practi¬
cally in the lap of a dignified, gray-haired man, with a pink, gentle face, which
was a little too soft around the mouth.
“That’s his producer,” Kit said as I was about to ask. “Sidney Fineman.” I
looked again. Fineman was one of the magic names like Goldwyn and Mayer.
As we waited for the lights to fade, we talked about Fineman. He was one of
the few real old-timers still on top. He had written scenarios for people who
have become myths or names of streets like Griffith and Ince. He was supposed
to have one of the finest collections of rare books in the country.
“And it isn’t just conspicuous consumption,” she said. “His idea of how to
spend one hell of an evening is to lock himself in his library alone. He built a
special house for his books at the back of his estate.”
The more she told me the more curious I was that a man like Sidney Fine-
man should want to work with Sammy.
724 Hollywood
“Fineman isn’t the man he was fifteen years ago,” she said. “He has just as much
taste as Thalberg and more guts. Hollywood was his girl. He loved her all the
time. He had ideas for making something out of her ...”
I could see Sammy out of the corner of my eye. He had finally worked his
way down to our aisle. He was leaning over two or three people to shake hands
with Junior Laemmle.
“But that’s all gone,” Kit was saying. “The depression killed something in him.
Not only losing his own dough, but the big bank boys like Chase and Atlas mov¬
ing in on his company. He began to get an obsession about the Wall Street bunch
working behind his back. He started playing safe. Now he’s just one of the top
dozen around town, making his old hits over and over again because he’s scared
to death thatthe minute he starts losing money they’ll take his name off the door.
He’s convinced Sammy is a money writer. And I have a sneaking suspicion who
convinced him.”
Sammy ducked into the seat beside me as the credit titles came on. I watched
his face as his name filled the screen:
ORIGINAL SCREEN PLAY
by
SAMMY CLICK
There is no word in English to describe it. You could say gloat, smile, leer,
grin, smirk, but it was all of those and something more, a look of deep sensual
pleasure. The expression held me fascinated because I felt it was something I
should not be allowed to see, like the face of the boy who roomed across the
hall from me in prep school when I had made the sordid mistake of entering with¬
out knocking.
Then Sammy leaned over and whispered something in my ear that will al¬
ways seem more perverse than anything in Krafft-Ebing.
“Just for a gag,” he said, “clap for me.”
The most perverse part of the story is that I did. There were my hands clap¬
ping foolishly like seal flappers. The applause was taken up and spread through
the house, not what you would call a thunderous ovation, just enough of a sprin¬
kle to make my hands feel like blushing. It wasn’t bad enough that I had become
Sammy’s drinking companion. I had to be his one-man claque. My applause
couldn’t have been more automatic if Sammy had previously hypnotized me and
led me into the theater.
As I stared at that credit title I had a feeling that something was missing. But
it wasn’t until the screen was telling us who designed the wardrobe and assisted
the director that I remembered what it was. Julian. Julian Blumberg, the kid
B udd Schulberg
7 25
who made the little snowball that Sammy was rolling down the Alps. Granting
that Sammy had written, God knows how, the screen play alone, the worst it
should have been was original story by Samuel Glick and Julian Blumberg pre¬
ceding the screen play credit. But there it was, all Sammy Glick, no Julian
Blumberg.
On impulse, but a better one than before, I leaned over and asked Sammy
whether he noticed anything funny about that screen credit and when he didn’t,
I enlightened him. It was like lighting a candle in Mammoth Cave.
“That first story we did all went in the ashcan, Al,” he said in a thick whis¬
per. “I had to start from scratch. I know it’s atoughbreak for the kid, but that’s
Hollywood.”
“The hell it is,” I said. “That’s Sammy Glick.”
Kit said a sharp shhhhh.
As the picture was opening I was wondering whether I would have agreed
with Sammy about Hollywood before I met her.
The picture wasn’t anything that would come back to you as you were climb¬
ing into bed, or even remember as you were reaching under the seat for your
hat; it was a good example of the comedy romance formula that Hollywood has
down cold, with emphasis not on content but on the facility with which it is told.
It was right in the groove that Hollywood has been geared for, slick, swift and
clever. What Kit calls the Golden Rut.
But in spite of the entertainment on the screen I preferred the show going on
in the adjoining seat. I never saw a man work so hard at seeing a picture. “Eleven
already,” he said to me a couple of minutes after the picture started, and I real¬
ized he had a docker in his hand and was counting the laughs. And each time
they laughed he jotted down feverishly the line or the bit of business. And every
time they didn’t he’d mumble, “It’s that goddam ham—he’s murdering my line,”
or “That’s a dead spot they can kill when they trim it.”
I just sat there watching him learn the motion-picture business. He was an
apt student all right. He learned something about pictures in five months that
I’m just beginning to understand after five years. Hollywood always has its
bumper crop of phonies, but believe it or not, Sammy was one of the less obvi¬
ous ones. He was smart enough to know that the crook who cracks his jobs too
consistently is sure to be caught. His secret was to be just as conscientious about
the real work he did as about the filching and finagling.
The picture got a good hand as the lights came on again. I turned to follow
Sammy up the aisle but Kit grabbed my arm.
“Out this way,” she said. “It’s better.”
She indicated the emergency exit on the side. It led us to an alley that ran
around the theater. As we walked through the darkness toward the street, Kit
said:
726 Hollywood
“I always like to duck out before anybody asks me how I liked the picture.”
“Even if you did?”
“It isn’t that simple. Hollywood has a regular ritual for preview reactions.
When they know they’ve got a turkey they want to be reassured. And when they
have one that’s okay they expect superlatives.”
She illustrated her point by telling the old Hollywood story about the three
yes-men who are asked what they think of the preview. The first says it is with¬
out a doubt the greatest picture ever made. The second says it is absolutely colos¬
sal and stupendous. The third one is fired for shaking his head and saying, “I don’t
know, I only think it’s great.”
“Just the same,” I said, “I’m impressed. To tell the truth I didn’t know Sammy
had it in him.”
“Don’t misunderstand,” she said. “I think it’s a damn good movie. The only
thing I have against those guys is that they’re like the old Roman Caesars—every
piddling little success becomes an excuse for staging a triumph. And I just don’t
happen to enjoy being dragged along behind the chariot.”
When we reached the street Sammy was standing with half a dozen men
bunched on the curb in front of the theater. They all seemed to be talking at
once, though Sammy was doing his best to drown them out. Kit pointed out the
others besides Sammy and Fineman, the director, the cutter, several other ex¬
ecutives and the cameraman. A couple of others were hovering around the
edge, mostly listening and reacting. Fineman and the director seemed to be hav¬
ing an argument. The director was yelling that if they yanked his favorite scene
they could take his name off the picture. Sammy was supporting Fineman.
We watched a boy bring out a ladder and climb up efficiently to change the
lettering on the marquee, and then Kit said, “These sidewalk conferences are li¬
able to last all night. Let’s go and have a drink. He can meet us there.”
My mind kept remembering the way she had made herself at home at Sammy’s
as we left that night. It was crazy to let it annoy me because I hadn’t even made
up my mind yet whether I liked her or not. I liked the way her mind drove at
things but there was something disconcerting about the way she kept you from
getting too close to her.
As we started for the parking station, she turned around and called to Sammy
briskly. “The Cellar.”
An anemic young man in a shabby overcoat was waiting at the car. I knew
him, but I couldn’t place him until he began to talk. Of course it was Julian Blum-
berg.
He was unable to hide the terrible effort it was for him to approach me. You
could see it was an act of desperation.
“Mr. Manheim; I don’t think you remember me . . .”
His eyes seemed to be forever crying. He kept cracking his knuckles, shift-
B u dd Schulberg
727
ing his balance and looking everywhere but at me. The Jewish language has the
best word I have ever heard for people like Julian: nebbish. A nebbish person is
not exactly an incompetent, a dope or a weakling. He is simply the one in the
crowd that you always forget to introduce. “Of course I do,” I said. “Glad to see
»
you.
I tried to make it sound hearty. He extended his hand as if he expected me
to crack it with a ruler. I could feel the perspiration in his palm.
When I introduced him to Kit he gave her a preoccupied nod and then, as if
he had been sucking in his breath for it a long time, he blurted out what he wanted
to say to me. As with so many timorous people, when it finally came out it
sounded brusque and overbold.
“Mr. Manheim, I’ve got to see you right away.”
“Sure, Julian,” I said, “can you tell me what it’s about?”
He looked at Kit suspiciously. “Alone,” he said. “I want to talk to you alone.”
His voice begged and demanded at the same time. I suppose I should have
been sore, but it was hard to miss the undertones in Julian’s rudeness.
“All right,” I said, “will it take very long?”
The determination valve suddenly seemed to loosen and the bluster leaked
out of him. “Gosh, Mr. Manheim, I know I’m being a nuisance but I wouldn’t
think of bothering you like this unless ...”
“How long would you say it would take?” I interrupted impatiently.
“It’s—there’s quite a lot to tell. I’d say a couple of hours.”
I looked at Kit. “Why don’t you two go ahead?” she said. “I don’t mind being
alone.”
That was the trouble, I knew she didn’t mind being alone.
“I’ll tell you what you do, Julian. It’ll keep until lunch tomorrow, won’t it?
How about dropping around at the studio? Twelve-thirty okay?”
He was so grateful it was painful. He backed away like an awkward courtier,
hoping he wasn’t being too much trouble and thanking me again.
“Who is that damp little fellow?” Kit asked as she pressed her foot on the
starter.
I still didn’t feel Iknewherwell enough to tell her the story of Girl Steals Boy.
So I just said he was a writer Sammy and I knew in New York who was out here
looking for a job.
“No wonder he looked worried,” she said. “There were exactly two hundred
and fifty of us working today. The Guild keeps a daily check-up. And do you
know how many screen writers there are? Nearly a thousand. With carloads of
bright-eyed college kids arriving every week—willing to do or die for dear old
World-Wide at thirty-five a week.”
728 Hollywood
Howard Koch
The time of the blacklist was a dark age for Hollywood, as anti-Communist witch-hunters
went on the prowl in the late 1940s and early 19SOs, encouraging industry figures to
denounce one another. Those who did not found themselves unemployable and went into
exile, left the industry, or worked at cut rates under pseudonyms. One of the dirty little
secrets of the congressional Red hunters was that you could get off the blacklist if you paid
off the right guy and were willing to make a "confession." This plot detail was used in
Irwin Winkler’s Guilty by Suspicion (1991), a film about the blacklist, and here is tes¬
timony that the practice actually existed. Howard Koch, the coauthor of Casablanca, was
one of the blacklist victims and along with other suspects was subpoenaed to testify in Wash¬
ington.
from As Time Goes By
Before appearing in Washington, those of us who had been served subpoenas
gathered in Edward G. Robinson’s home in Beverly Hills to discuss how to deal
collectively with the situation confronting nineteen of us, the opening move in
a campaign that was going to affect the entire film community and, eventually,
the country at large. John Huston and Philip Dunne had organized what was
termed the “Committee of a Hundred” to support us and defend our rights. Pre¬
sent at the meeting were many of Hollywood’s celebrated figures, including
Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and John Garfield. After
much discussion it was decided that as many of their committee as could get away
would appear at the hearings on our behalf.
That nightmarish week in Washington will remain with me the rest of my
life. We were in our own capital, yet no foreign city could have been more alien
and hostile. All our hotel rooms were bugged. When we, the nineteen “un-
Howard Koch
729
friendly witnesses,” wanted to talk with each other or with our attorneys, we
had either to keep twirling a metal key to jam the circuit or to go out of doors.
It became clear from the outset of the hearings that this was no impartial inves¬
tigation or trial, but an inquisition, impure and simple, designed to break down,
expose, and vilify the political and social beliefs of those who dissented from the
now-established Cold War policies.
Although I was one of the nineteen, I was in one sense an outsider from my
own group since I disagreed with the stand taken by the majority.
Led by members of what later became known as the “Hollywood Ten” and
approved by all three of our lawyers, they decided not to answer any of the com¬
mittee’s questions relating to their political associations and beliefs. Their po¬
sition was based on a literal interpretation of the First Amendment protecting
an individual’s freedom of belief and expression. 1 had every respect for their
principled position and still have. My disagreement was purely tactical. 1 con¬
tended that in a period of public hysteria induced by the widely publicized “Red
menace,” the Bill of Rights would be disregarded or circumvented one way or
another. My counterproposal was for all of us to speak out and defend affirma¬
tively our own and each other’s political beliefs and associations.
Several of the ten and one of our lawyers tried hard to persuade me that theirs
was the right course and that my stand would disrupt the unity of the “unfriendly
nineteen.” I argued that our refusal to answer would be interpreted by the press
and the public as an admission of guilt, as proof of our havingsomething to hide.
Actually, there was nothing hidden from the committee. They knew who was
and who wasn’t a party member and, in fact, everything about us and our asso¬
ciations. For the past months they had planted informers to infiltrate and report
on our activities. And any gap was filled in by the “friendly witnesses” who tes¬
tified against us at the start of the hearings.
Since most of the ten and the lawyers were solidly against my proposal, 1 had
misgivings: perhaps I was wrong, perhaps I was taking the easier way out since
I was not a party member, although at that time there was no law making mem¬
bership a crime. To test my position I met several times with John Huston at
night on the street where our conversation couldn’t be bugged. He listened to
both sides of the argument, then talked it over with the Committee of a Hun¬
dred. He reported back to me that they agreed with my proposal and were
willing to back it with full support of everyone under attack, whether a party
member or not.
This failed to sway the ten, who confronted the Congressional committee with
their refusals to answer, often eloquently. The First Amendment was brushed
aside by the committee and later by the courts; the ten men eventually went to
prison. Nine of the ten held steadfastly to their political beliefs and today, two
decades later, receptions are held in their honor, books and plays are written,
73 °
Hollywood
based on the transcripts of the hearings, in which they appear, deservedly, in
the role of heroes.
One evening when it had become clear we were losing whatever public and
industry support we once had, several of us were gathered in our hotel room
talking over our plight. The mood was anything but cheerful. Paul Draper, the
dancer and a long-time friend, dropped in, took a look at us, and made a sug¬
gestion. Paul stuttered in ordinary conversation but never on the stage.
“L-look, you guys. When you’re as d-down as you are tonight, there’s only
one th-thing to do.”
We all turned and looked at him. What was he going to propose—suicide?
“You order the b-best champagne you can get and d-drink it up. It never
f-fails.”
Anne thought it was a great idea; the rest of us went along. Paul did the or¬
dering. He knew the right vineyard and the best vintage year, directing the wine
steward to find what was wanted even if he had to dig it out of the vaults. And
it worked its bubbling magic. As the wine went down, our spirits rose. We be¬
came almost euphoric, casting out all inhibitions. If the committee played back
on their recording machine what was said that night, they must have heard some
astonishing things.
This little spree was a much-needed antidote to what was going on in the
committee room. The “friendly witnesses” such as Jack Warner, John Wayne,
and Adolphe Menjou were cataloguing our “political sins” in great detail and
getting full coverage by the press. Warner testified that in his opinion 1 was a
“Communist”; the studio had had to get rid of me because I was “slipping Com¬
munist propaganda in their films.” This had a special irony since it was at his
urgent request that I wrote the screenplay for Mission to Moscow, which had
brought him kudos at the time but was now obviously an embarrassment. I had
no opportunity to point this out at the hearings, as the committee canceled my
subpoena by a last-minute telegram, apparently not eager to have me testify.
Later Warner lamely admitted to a friend that he had “made a mistake.” How¬
ever that might be, I am still listed in the Congressional Record as Warner described
me, which shows that lies are preserved in these official volumes as carefully as
the truth.
The heads of the Hollywood studios, frightened by threats of boycotts of their
films by the American Legion and like-minded groups, capitulated and began a
wholesale purge of anyone suspected of Communist membership or leftist lean-
ings.
Contracts were broken at will. The morals clause, equating nonconformity
with immorality, provided a legal excuse. Caution dictated the pictures now
being made. Any idea with the slightest social implication was taboo. Using the
threat of boycott, the various committees and their adherents had captured a
Howard Koch
73 i
powerful communications medium which, for a time, had dared to question what
had become official policy.
In social gatherings one had to be careful what subjects were discussed, and
with whom. One even had to watch which movie houses one attended. (Avoid
Russian films. Self-appointed spies could be lurking to record the identifying
numbers on car license plates.) And this shadowed world had its physical coun¬
terpart. Smog had seeped in from the open storage tanks of the oil refineries
and, fed by the increasing motor traffic, was casting its pall over Los Angeles
and its environs.
Not because of sentiment, but because my pictures had made the studios a great
deal of money, a powerful agent who shall be nameless asked me to come to his
office; he had a proposition to make. He would arrange a meeting for me with
the attorney who was the liaison to the House Un-American Activities Com¬
mittee. All 1 had to do was spend a half-hour with this party, renouncing some
of my unpopular political views and associates, and pay the attorney seventy-
five hundred dollars. I told him that was a pretty expensive half-hour, both in
money and in conscience.
He said, “Don’t worry about the money. A studio will advance it as a down
payment on a writing assignment.”
“That isn’t what I’m worried about. It’s the other.”
He brushed that concern aside. “What do you care what you tell those bas¬
tards? Keep your fingers crossed.”
“I’d have to keep them crossed the rest of my life.” I was curious. “Tell me,
who gets the seventy-five hundred dollars? That’s a pretty stiff fee for a half-hour
of anyone’s time.”
“That’s their business, not ours.”
“Well, thanks for trying, but the answer is ‘no.’ ”
“Don’t decide now. This is your last chance to stay in pictures. Talk it over
with your wife.”
“Her answer wouldn’t be any different.”
He shook his head. “Too bad. You’re throwing away a fine career.”
I went back to Palm Springs. There was a black telephone in an alcove off the
living room. I had never been conscious of how silent a phone could be until it
stops ringing.
7J2
Hollywood
Nathanael West
The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West (1903—1940), published in 1939, was
an apocalyptic vision of a Hollywood ruled by the mob; perhaps its buried sub ject was fas¬
cism. Its hero, a lowly studio employee and would-be painter named Tod Hackett, shares
with several other men (and no doubt with millions more in the darkness of theaters) a
passion for Faye Greener, a starlet whose friendly contempt for hisfeelings only inflames
them. In this chapter Faye has been avoiding Tod, and as he pursues her on a studio back
lot, West makes a hallucinatory nightmare out of the back lot jumble.
from The Day of the Locust
Faye moved out of the San Berdoo the day after the funeral. Tod didn’t know
where she had gone and was getting up the courage to call Mrs. Jenning when
he saw her from the window of his office. She was dressed in the costume of a
Napoleonic vivandiere. By the time he got the window open, she had almost
turned the comer of the building. He shouted for her to wait. She waved, but
when he got downstairs she was gone.
From her dress, he was sure that she was working in the picture called “Wa¬
terloo.” He asked a studio policeman where the company was shooting and was
told on the back lot. He started toward it at once. A platoon of cuirassiers, big
men mounted on gigantic horses, went by. He knew that they must be headed
for the same set and followed them. They broke into a gallop and he was soon
outdistanced.
The sun was very hot. His eyes and throat were choked with the dust thrown
up by the horses’ hooves and his head throbbed. The only bit of shade he could
find was under an ocean liner made of painted canvas with real life boats hang¬
ing from its davits. He stood in its narrow shadow for a while, then went on to¬
ward a great forty-foot papier mache sphinx that loomed up in the distance. He
Nathanael West
733
had to cross a desert to reach it, a desert that was continually being made larger
by a fleet of trucks dumping white sand. He had gone only a few feet when a
man with a megaphone ordered him off.
He skirted the desert, making a wide turn to the right, and came to a West¬
ern street with a plank sidewalk. On the porch of the “Last Chance Saloon” was
a rocking chair. He sat down on it and lit a cigarette.
From there he could see a jungle compound with a water buff alo tethered to
the side of a conical grass hut. Every few seconds the animal groaned musically.
Suddenly an Arab charged by on a white stallion. He shouted at the man, but
got no answer. A little while later he saw a truck with a load of snow and sev¬
eral malamute dogs. He shouted again. The driver shouted something back, but
didn’t stop.
Throwing away his cigarette, he went through the swinging doors of the sa¬
loon. There was no back to the building and he found himself in a Paris street.
He followed it to its end, coming out in a Romanesque courtyard. He heard
voices a short distance away and went toward them. On a lawn of fiber, a group
of men and women in riding costume were picnicking. They were eating card¬
board food in front of a cellophane waterfall. He started toward them to ask his
way, but was stopped by a man who scowled and held up a sign—“Quite,
Please, We’re Shooting.” When Tod took another step forward, the man shook
his fist threateningly.
Next he came to a small pond with large celluloid swans floating on it. Across
one end was a bridge with a sign that read, “To Kamp Komfit.” He crossed the
bridge and followed a little path that ended at a Greek temple dedicated to Eros.
The god himself lay face downward in a pile of old newspapers and bottles.
From the steps of the temple, he could see in the distance a road lined with
Lombardy poplars. It was the one on which he had lost the cuirassiers. He
pushed his way through a tangle of briars, old flats and iron junk, skirting the
skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of
Troy, a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended
against the branches of an oak, part of the Fourteenth Street elevated station, a
Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimac, a cor¬
ner of a Mayan temple, until he finally reached the road.
He was out of breath. He sat down under one of the poplars on a rock made
of brown plaster and took off his jacket. There was a cool breeze blowing and
he soon felt more comfortable.
He had lately begun to think not only of Goya and Daumier but also of cer¬
tain Italian artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of Salvator Rosa,
Francesco Guardi and Monsu Desiderio, the painters of Decay and Mystery.
Looking down hill now, he could see compositions that might have actually been
arranged from the Calabrian work of Rosa. There were partially demolished
734 Hollywood
buildings and broken monuments half hidden by great, tortured trees, whose
exposed roots writhed dramatically in the arid ground, and by shrubs that car¬
ried, not flowers or berries, but armories of spikes, hooks and swords.
For Guardi and Desiderio there were bridges which bridged nothing, sculp¬
ture in trees, palaces that seemed of marble until a whole stone portico began
to flap in the light breeze. And there were figures as well. A hundred yards from
where Tod was sitting a man in a derby hat leaned drowsily against the gilded
poop of a Venetian barque and peeled an apple. Still farther on, a charwoman
on a stepladder was scrubbing with soap and water the face of a Buddha thirty
feet high.
He left the road and climbed across the spine of the hill to look down on the
other side. From there he could see a ten-acre field of cockleburs spotted with
clumps of sunflowers and wild gum. In the center of the field was a gigantic pile
of sets, flats and props. While he watched, a ten-ton truck added another load
to it. This was the final dumping ground. He thought of Janvier’s “Sargasso Sea.”
Just as that imaginary body of water was a history of civilization in the form of
a marine junkyard, the studio lot was one in the form of a dream dump. A Sar¬
gasso of the imagination! And the dump grew continually, for there wasn’t a
dream afloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having
first been made photographic by plaster, canvas, lath and paint. Many boats sink
and never reach the Sargasso, but no dream ever entirely disappears. Somewhere
it troubles some unfortunate person and some day, when that person has been
sufficiently troubled, it will be reproduced on the lot.
When he saw a red glare in the sky and heard the rumble of cannon, he knew
it must be Waterloo. From around a bend in the road trotted several cavalry
regiments. They wore casques and chest armor of black cardboard and carried
long horse pistols in their saddle holsters. They were Victor Hugo’s soldiers.
He had worked on some of the drawings for their uniforms himself, following
carefully the descriptions in “Les Miserables.”
He went in the direction they took. Before long he was passed by the men of
Lefebvre-Desnouttes, followed by a regiment of gendarmes d’elite, several
companies of chasseurs of the guard and a flying detachment of Rimbaud’s
lancers.
They must be moving up for the disastrous attack on La Haite Santee. He
hadn’t read the scenario and wondered if it had rained yesterday. Would
Grouchy or Blucher arrive? Grotenstein, the producer, might have changed it.
The sound of cannon was becoming louder all the time and the red fan in the
sky more intense. He could smell the sweet, pungent odor of blank powder. It
might be over before he could get there. He started to run. When he topped a
rise after a sharp bend in the road, he found a great plain below him covered
with early nineteenth-century troops, wearing all the gay and elaborate unif orms
Nathanael West
73S
that used to please him so much when he was a child and spent long hours look¬
ing at the soldiers in an old dictionary. At the far end of the field, he could see
an enormous hump around which the English and their allies were gathered. It
was Mont St. Jean and they were getting ready to defend it gallantly. It wasn’t
quite finished, however, and swarmed with grips, property men, set dressers,
carpenters and painters.
Tod stood near a eucalyptus tree to watch, concealing himself behind a sign
that read, “ ‘Waterloo’—A Charles H. Grotenstein Production.” Near by a
youth in a carefully torn horse guard’s uniform was being rehearsed in his lines
by one of the assistant directors.
“Vive l’Empereur!” the young man shouted, then clutched his breast and fell
forward dead. The assistant director was a hard man to please and made him do
it over and over again.
In the center of the plain, the battle was going ahead briskly. Things looked
tough for the British and their allies. The Prince of Orange commanding the cen¬
ter, Hill the right and Picton the left wing, were being pressed hard by the vet¬
eran French. The desperate and intrepid Prince was in an especially bad spot.
Tod heard him cry hoarsely above the din of battle, shouting to the Hollande-
Belgians, “Nassau! Brunswick! Never retreat!” Nevertheless, the retreat began.
Hill, too, fell back. The French killed General Picton with a ball through the
head and he returned to his dressing room. Alten was put to the sword and also
retired. The colors of the Lunenberg battalion, borne by a prince of the family
of Deux-Ponts, were captured by a famous child star in the uniform of a Parisian
drummer boy. The Scotch Greys were destroyed and went to change into an¬
other uniform. Ponsonby’s heavy dragoons were also cut to ribbons. Mr.
Grotenstein would have a large bill to pay at the Western Costume Company.
Neither Napoleon nor Wellington was to be seen. In Wellington’s absence,
one of the assistant directors, a Mr. Crane, was in command of the allies. He
reinforced his center with one of Chasse’s brigades and one of Wincke’s. He
supported these with infantry from Brunswick, Welsh foot, Devon yeomanry
and Hanoverian light horse with oblong leather caps and flowing plumes of
horsehair.
For the French, a man in a checked cap ordered Milhaud’s cuirassiers to carry
Mont St. Jean. With their sabers in their teeth and their pistols in their hands,
they charged. It was a fearful sight.
The man in the checked cap was making a fatal error. Mont St. Jean was un¬
finished. The paint was not yet dry and all the struts were not in place. Because
of the thickness of the cannon smoke, he had failed to see that the hill was still
being worked on by property men, grips and carpenters.
It was the classic mistake, Tod realized, the same one Napoleon had made.
Then it had been wrong for a different reason. The Emperor had ordered the
736 Hollywood
cuirassiers to charge Mont St. Jean not knowing that a deep ditch was hidden at
its foot to trap his heavy cavalry. The result had been disaster for the French;
the beginning of the end.
This time the same mistake had a different outcome. Waterloo, instead of
being the end of the Grand Army, resulted in a draw. Neither side won, and it
would have to be fought over again the next day. Big losses, however, were sus¬
tained by the insurance company in workmen’s compensation. The man in the
checked cap was sent to the dog house by Mr. Grotenstein just as Napoleon was
sent to St. Helena.
When the front rank of Milhaud’s heavy division started up the slope of Mont
St. Jean, the hill collapsed. The noise was terrific. Nails screamed with agony
as they pulled out of joists. The sound of ripping canvas was like that of little
children whimpering. Lath and scantling snapped as though they were brittle
bones. The whole hill folded like an enormous umbrella and covered Napoleon’s
army with painted cloth.
It turned into a route. The victors of Bersina, Leipsic, Austerlitz, fled like
schoolboys who had broken a pane of glass. “Sauve qui peut!” they cried, or,
rather, “Scram!”
The armies of England and her allies were too deep in scenery to flee. They
had to wait for the carpenters and ambulances to come up. The men of the gal¬
lant Seventy-Fifth Highlanders were lifted out of the wreck with block and
tackle. They were carted off by the stretcher-bearers, still clinging bravely to
their claymores.
Oscar. Levant
In many of the musicals of the 1940s and 1950s Oscar Levant (1906—1972) was like
the ghost at the banquet. What did audiences make of his dyspeptic cynicism in the midst
of all that music and romance? Yet he was wildly popular, the costar of a radio program
with Al Jolson. It was widely known that he was a neurotic pillhead—that was his per¬
sona, somewhat modified for general consumption—and a case can be made that he paved
the way for Lenny Bruce and the other revolutionary comics of the 1950s. He was also a
talented pianist and composer and probably one of the smartest men in Hollywood at the
time, and perhaps his unlikely career as a movie star can be explained by the fact that so
Oscar Levant
737
many powerful people enjoyed having him around. His Memoirs of an Amnesiac reads
like a guy recalling all his one-liners, but because they were great one-liners, that’s okay.
from The Memoirs of an Amnesiac
In 1940 I was asked to do a movie for Paramount Studios. When I informed them
that I couldn’t act, my modesty beguiled them and I was signed for three pic¬
tures.
The first was Rhythm on the River with Bing Crosby and for a Crosby picture
it was quite good. I played an unsympathetic part—myself—in which I was re¬
lentlessly and irrepressibly audacious, supplying many of my own lines.
Basil Rathbone, a charming man, was the heavy in the picture. He played a
stuffed shirt and, I may add, he was not miscast. At lunch the conversation was
limited to the success or failure of his bowel movements.
I got along with everybody including Mary Martin and the director Victor
Schertzinger, a good musician who had written the songs for The Love Parade,
Ernst Lubitsch’s first talking picture.
My second picture for Paramount was Kiss the Boys Goodbye, based loosely on
a play by Clare Boothe Luce.
Mary Martin had made a big hit in a New York musical doing a charming
striptease as she sang “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” but the mild strip number
that she did in Kiss the Boys Goodbye was as sexy as hanging out the wash.
On my return to New York, after that picture, I was interviewed at Grand
Central Station and when asked what kind of part I had played, I said, “It’s the
kind of part you get when the studio wants to break your contract.” Actually it
was a good part and I can’t account for that remark except that it was said out
of impudence.
In 1944 I was signed by Warner Brothers to appear in Rhapsody in Blue, the al¬
leged story of George Gershwin.
Igor Stravinsky visited the set when we were making that picture. Immedi¬
ately before his visit I’d read the life of Ferruccio Busoni, who was a great pi¬
anist and a major figure in promulgating the ultimate contemporary music of
his period. I learned that during World War I, all the great musicians were in
neutral Switzerland and that Busoni and Stravinsky had met only once, though
they lived a mere five miles apart. Stravinsky was of course a young man at that
time.
“Why did you visit Busoni only once?” I asked Stravinsky.
738 Hollywood
His answer was cryptic. He said, “Because he represented the immediate past
and I hate the immediate past.”
Igor Stravinsky can be waspish, too. When someone called him for an ap¬
pointment recently, he looked at his appointment book, then said, “Not Mon¬
day . . . not Tuesday . . . not Wednesday . . .” Then suddenly, in a burst of
ecstasy, he slammed the book closed and cried, “Never!”
Rhapsody in Blue was a big hit and I was signed by Warners for two more pic¬
tures.
My next was Humoresque, which was based on a rejected script of Rhapsody in
Blue, written by Clifford Odets. There was also another writer, but I wrote most
of my own lines. I was let loose on this picture as though I were Franz Liszt giv¬
ing a recital.
Jerry Wald produced Humoresque and drew upon my personal experiences as
a concert artist to authenticate the role of the violinist, played by John Garfield.
John Garfield had made his first big movie hit in the picture Four Daughters,
in which he based his characterization on me. The one person to recognize this
and point it out was Hedda Hopper, whom I had met in my early days in Hol¬
lywood.
As technical adviser of Humoresque I insisted that when Garfield made his debut
as a violinist in one scene, the hall be only half filled, with no tuxedoes worn
and no formal attire. People don’t go to concerts in white ties. That still goes
on only in the movies.
I believe that this picture was the first attempt in a movie to reveal the true
conditions of a struggling concert artist in the preparation and problems of a
debut.
What made the picture seem slightly old-fashioned was the role of the per¬
sonalized patron of the arts. The lower East Side boy (Garfield) launched in his
career by a wealthy socialite (Joan Crawford) was indigenous to the time when
Fannie Hurst wrote the novel Humoresque.
John Garfield, whom everyone called Julie, had to be photographed playing
the violin, simulating the technique of the left hand fingering and the right hand
bowing it. They had great difficulty with this scene. They couldn’t arrive at a
modus operandi until finally, in close shots, they had two violinists crouched out
of camera range; one did the fingerwork and the other the bowing. The violin
was attached to Garfield’s neck. The real playing was pre-recorded by the great
Isaac Stem, and I accompanied him on the piano. After a couple of takes, I sug¬
gested, “Why don’t the five of us make a concert tour?”
One of the most astonishing musical crimes ever perpetrated in a serious
picture was the arrangement for violin, piano and orchestra of all the salient cli¬
mactic portions of Tristan and Isolde as background music for the final ten min¬
utes of Humoresque, during which time Joan Crawford laboriously committed
Oscar Levant
739
suicide. Isaac Stem didn’t object but I did to no avail. However, it was very
effective.
In one scene the director wanted my face to reflect deep concern. He tried
several takes, then finally said, “Oscar, just imagine that your kids are sick—
very sick.” I got so mad that I almost punched him in the nose.
I said a line to Joan Crawford, who played the part of a married woman with
multiple sexual activities, “Why don’t you get a divorce and settle down?”
I had one line in the script which I refused to utter unless I gave due credit.
It was originally said by Leopold Godowsky, a great pianist in his time, whose
son is married to George Gershwin’s sister Frankie. The line was: “I don’t like
to go to concerts because if they’re good, I’m jealous; if they’re bad, I’m bored.”
Jerry Wald said, “Why don’t you say it?”
“I’ll say it if I can say, ‘as Leopold Godowsky said . . .’ ” I replied.
“You can’t do that,” he insisted.
So I didn’t say the line. But when I saw the picture, Garfield said it—with¬
out acknowledging the source.
Jerry would always come on the set with copious notes and he would keep
asking me, “Can’t you use this line: ‘Don’t think it hasn’t been fun, because it
hasn’t’?” It was an archaic line even then, but he wouldn’t give up.
With stoical resistance, I continued to refuse.
I recall suggesting a line to Jerry—“I love you is an inadequate way to say I
love you”—which he used in his next picture, Possessed. The New Yorker critic sin¬
gled the line out as being most peculiar.
Joan Crawford was the illustrious and glamorous star of Humoresque. She was
always accompanied to lunch by her hairdresser, the equivalent of priest, psy¬
choanalyst and lawyer. The hairdresser is themost important member of a star’s
family. It was right after the war and Crawford always had two raw steaks under
her arm.
The queen of the Warner lot at that time was Bette Davis. One day at lunch
she was sitting a table away and Joan Crawford went over and said some pleas¬
antry. Bette Davis cut her dead. Joan was bathed in tears and didn’t recover for
quite a while.
Jerry Wald and I were very close friends, though we had occasional minor
disagreements, and any close friend of mine—as I’ve often said—must be crazy.
Jerry was a man of infectious enthusiasm, and was warm, kind and generous
in his private life.
He had an enormous library and I would borrow his books. They had vo¬
luminous notations on almost every page; not just significant or epithetical or
epigrammatical notes, but line after line underlined in red ink. I borrowed a
great number of them and I not only loathed, but often refused, to return
them.
74 °
Hollywood
Once Jerry borrowed Kenneth Tynan’s first book, He Who Would Play King,
from me. I’d borrowed it from Vincente Minnelli. Jerry refused to return it.
After his death, his widow said to Vincente, “I’ll return the book Jerry bor¬
rowed from you.”
Vincente replied, “Oh, that was Jose Ferrer’s book in the first place. I had to
return it to him, so I sent to England for a copy.”
Jerry’s two favorite plays, which he manipulated mysteriously, were Robert
Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest and Somerset Maugham’s The Letter. In a number
of the pictures Jerry made, he had these counterplots disguised, and Warner
Brothers also had a big backlog of dramatic properties which he constantly, and
not too surreptitiously, drew upon.
As far as directors were concerned he was limited to those who were under
contract to Warners, and when he signed John Huston to direct Key Largo it was
considered a brilliant coup. However[,] Richard Brooks, who was the
scriptwriter, told me that Jerry was only able to achieve this by promising Hus¬
ton a great screen treatment. When it proved to be less than true, Huston was
furious and barred Jerry from the set. Despite this antagonism Jerry had ac¬
complished what he had wanted—to hire a director of stature. It did have quite
a cast, with Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart; and I think it was very
successful.
Claire Trevor was in it and had to sing a song without accompaniment. She
told Huston that she’d take vocal lessons, but he wouldn’t let her; he wanted
the opposite result: a naked, barren, raw voice unadorned. Claire won an award
for that picture.
The most critical comment about Jerry Wald that I can remember was made
by Phil Yordan—a writer of mysterious origins.
Phil confided to me with a gentle sigh—it was like one elder statesman com¬
menting on another—“You know, Jerry Wald never really knew how to steal.”
When Yordan was on my television show, he was trying to plug Anna Lucasta,
a picture based on his play.
It bore a marked resemblance to Anna Christie but ethnically it was about a
Polish family and then changed to an all-Negro cast for the movie. The picture
was done with Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis, Jr.
At the end of my show, Yordan asked, “Do you want to hear about my fail¬
ures?”
I said, “No, your successes are depressing enough.”
Jerry Wald finally did To Have and Have Not, by Hemingway. It was the third
time it had been done.
There was a robbery in Jerry’s version. I looked at the script and the robbery
looked foolproof. I said to Jerry, “The hell with the picture . . . let’s do the rob¬
bery.”
Oscar Levant
74i
He took credit for this line and issued it to the newspapers—no one used self-
advertisement more egregiously than he.
Jerry once quoted another producer as saying, “My comedies are not to be
laughed at.”
During his years as a producer at Warner Brothers, Jerry did two of Ten¬
nessee Williams’ plays but when he went to 20th Century-Fox Tennessee’s price
became too prohibitive as far as Jerry was concerned.
He suddenly became involved with Faulkner. He’d buy a Faulkner property
and that turgid, incomprehensible prose was on one occasion transformed into
The Long Hot Summer. In that picture Orson Welles played a “big daddy” type of
role. Sometimes he was inaudible—Those were his best moments.
Jerry took me to a televised theatre showing of the Marciano-Archie Moore
fight. He was just about to make The Harder They Fall, by Budd Schulberg.
In the second round Moore hit Rocky Marciano, who went down quickly but
got up at the count of five. Jerry made a note of that and incorporated it in The
Harder They Fall.
Fortunately I never saw the picture, but it was about Primo Camera. I saw
Camera’s first fight with Big Boy Peterson. I was with Jean Arthur the night
Camera fought Ernie Schaaf; in the twelfth round Schaaf went down. Everyone
stood up and booed, thinking it was a fixed fight. Ernie Schaaf died a short time
later.
When Jerry was top independent producer at Columbia, Cecil B. De Mille’s
hot breath was down everyone’s neck, so Jerry decided to do a Biblical picture.
One of the only stories that hadn’t been touched was Joseph and His Brothers, but
in order to avoid paying for the rights to Thomas Mann’s trilogy, Wald hired
Clifford Odets to write a treatment. Odets had just written what was to be his
last play, The Flowering Peach, about Noah.
Columbia had a contract with Rita Hayworth, then a glittering symbol of
Hollywood and still beautiful. A starting date had been set, so they built sets
without having a script, and Odets just wrote a few scenes for Rita, who was
to play Potiphar’s wife. Rita claimed the script was skeletal and refused to
do it.
Odets worked at it and finally had a thousand-page script, but they never did
the picture. I don’t know what the final straw was, but I believe the costs were
astronomical.
Rita was then married to Dick Haymes. June and I met them, and Haymes,
a rather presumptuous fellow, proceeded to tell us about the size of Joseph
Haydn’s orchestra. Interestingly, he was in error on all counts.
For political or temperamental reasons, Harry Cohn, head of Columbia,
liked people no one else wanted and always gave them jobs. In the early 30’s,
when I used to go with Jean Arthur, she was out of work and we were sitting
742
Hollywood
in the Vine Street Brown Derby when Cohn was lunching there. He saw her,
gave her a job on the spot, and she became a great star.
Clifford Odets wrote the script for a picture for Elvis Presley. In the story he
had Presley commit suicide at the end of the picture, which was far from en¬
dearing to the audience at the preview. Never was such horror expressed by so
many. He rewrote the finish, but only Odets would write a story for Elvis in
which he committed suicide. Actually, it was humiliating that Odets had to write
that kind of picture at all, but he needed the money. Everything he was against,
in the beginning of his career, he wound up doing himself.
Clifford Odets first made his stunning presence felt on Broadway with Awake
and Sing and Waiting for Lefty. He was invited to all the big parties; and Beatrice
Lillie was quite taken with him for a while. There were other girls, one a fa¬
mous picture star whom he brought to our apartment for dinner. I asked him
why he didn’t marry her.
“She has no bosom,” he replied rather dejectedly.
I considered that a rather narrow and specious comment about love.
(In the early 4o’s, he and I had a great summit meeting at Lindy’s with Dr.
Karl Menninger, Moss Hart, Artie Shaw and all the leading Broadway neu¬
rotics. I told Dr. Menninger that we were wearing our sweaters with the letter
F for Freud.)
When Clifford’s play Night Music opened, Moss Hart and I had a date for din¬
ner. Moss had a mildly hysterical case of jealousy about Odets, with his plays of
social protest. I arrived at Dinty Moore’s five minutes late and Moss carried on
like a wounded stag. I said to Moss, “I’m not a dame. I’m only five minutes late!”
But when Night Music had revealed itself as a rehashed rewrite of Paradise Lost
and Awake and Sing, Moss was in a state of high elation.
In those days Clifford was the most arrogant man I’d ever met, but I was eas¬
ily mesmerized by egomaniacs.
He once said to me, “The three greatest living playwrights are O’Neill,
O’Casey and Odets.”
The last time we saw Clifford, my wife reminded him of that remark.
“Did I say that?” he asked. He was shocked.
In the early 40’s when I was on my way to the Pacific Coast to play some con¬
certs, Odets and I were on the same train for three or four days. He was read¬
ing The Storm, a play by the Russian, Aleksandr Ostrovski. (Tschaikowsky in his
diary wrote that Andrew Carnegie looked just like Ostrovski.)
At the end of the first act Clifford threw the play down with a tremendous
bang and shouted, “This guy can’t kiss my ass!” He peremptorily dismissed it
and ranted at me, “You’re supposed to be a friend of mine!”
Oscar Levant
743
“I am,” I replied.
“Then did you like my play Night Music?” he asked.
“I liked it but you wrote it much better in Paradise Lost, "I said.
“You’re a friend of mine?” he asked again.
“Yes,” I repeated.
“If you were a friend of mine, you would have seen Night Music three times—
four times!” he yelled, pounding the table.
And he kept reproaching me for not having seen the play more than once.
Actually, I’d loathed it. It had that inescapable Communist ending: Let there be
light, or Let there be air or what have you.
We stopped off in Chicago where Al Jolson was appearing in Hold onto Your
Hats. We went to the Drake Hotel to see him, and found him in a terrible state.
He’d been divorced from Ruby Keeler, his great love, and Al wanted her to let
their adopted child see him in the show but Ruby had refused her permission.
Jolson carried on in a harangue of profanity that surprised Clifford.
In Kansas City, the great stop in the hegira of the Super Chief, there was a
superior bookstore in the station, but Clifford wouldn’t get off the train. He
pulled down the blinds and refused to move. I had a Kansas City paper which
said that Martin Dies was in town that day. Dies was then Chairman of the House
Un-American Activities Committee, and it was well known that Clifford was
suspect. But I still thought it strange that he wouldn’t at least stretchhis legs for
a few minutes.
We were shunted into a siding in some small town in Arizona and a freight
train kept huffing and puffing on the other track.
“Chug! Chug! Chug!” Clifford shouted excitedly as he made rhythmic pump¬
ing movements with his feet in imitation of the train. “That’s power!”
“That’s corny,” I replied, “they now have diesels that don’t make a sound.”
He glared at me.
When Odets was married to Luise Rainer, she gave a sour-cream dinner in
my honor, but they fought during the first course and he left and went to a strik¬
ers’ meeting.
When Luise won the Academy Award, Clifford said that she had not wanted
to attend the ceremonies—she thought it would be fun to dress in old clothes
and mingle anonymously with the crowds outside the theatre. It was only at the
last minute that he was able to persuade her to go.
I used to talk to Clifford about the old days of Golden Boy and Rocket to the
Moon. His plays were usually directed by Harold Clurman, but Odets resented
the fact that Luther Adler (who is a wonderful actor) played the title role in Golden
Boy. Clifford had wanted John Garfield and was always reluctant to forgive
Clurman for that.
Frances Farmer, who played Loma Moon in Golden Boy, was pursued by both
744 Hollywood
Odets and Clurman. The mention of her name by Clifford was usually accom¬
panied by an enigmatic smile.
Clifford Odets had a tough time financially in his later years in Hollywood.
He had two children and he would cook for them. He had a pressure cooker and
was always cooking lamb shanks which were delicious.
A few years before he died I used to go over and ask for a few sleeping pills.
He would give them to me along with some of his lamb shanks.
Once when 1 went over to beg some pills he said, “You’re like my mother.
Life was too tough for my mother and it’s too tough for you.”
He would occasionally give me a pill until my wife found out and asked him
not to give me any more. He stopped even though I got desperate and called
him and pleaded with him. One night he seemed to relent; he said he would
drive over to my house. I waited as eagerly as Marcel Proust did for his mother’s
good night kiss. Then I got a call. Clifford said that in good conscience—be¬
cause of June—he couldn’t give me any pills.
My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day’s
first picture; that was before she became a virgin. She demonstrated her talents
as a superb comedienne and song stylist in that picture and it was no surprise
that she became one of the biggest Hollywood stars.
When I was at Warner Brothers, I came to know Howard Hawks; an illustri¬
ous American director. I even did a lamentable picture with him.
Up until recently the man who was in charge of studio operations, story, cast¬
ing, direction, and so forth, was called the Vice-President in Charge of Pro¬
duction.
Darryl Zanuck had that job most of his career. When June worked there, I
told her that she seemed to think he was President of the United States.
Some years ago Darryl was at a cafe in Paris with Howard Hawks, and he ex¬
pressed strong interest in a girl.
“I’m Darryl Zanuck, Vice-President in Charge of Production at 2oth Century-
Fox,” he proclaimed.
It made quite an impression. He was doing very well when he suddenly had
to retire to the men’s room. While he was away the girl turned to Howard
Hawks.
“Is he really Vice-President of 2oth Century-Fox?” she asked.
Howard Hawks nodded.
“How do you know?” she pressed.
Howard Hawks kept his usual poker face.
Oscar Levant
745
“Because I’m President,” he solemnly announced.
When Zanuck returned to the table, there was a marked diminution of ardor
on the girl’s part. The whole romance collapsed and the girl wound up with
Hawks.
I told Howard Hawks that I thought it was surprising that Hemingway’s The
Sun Also Rises had never been sold to the movies. There was an obvious reason:
the hero was impotent, though Hemingway had made him impotent physiolog¬
ically rather than psychologically. Nobody would touch it. It was before the cen¬
sors had relaxed.
Hawks bought the book for $7,500. He later sold it to Charlie Feldman, the
agent, for an enormous profit. Then Feldman sold it to Darryl Zanuck for an
even more enormous profit. But the grim irony remains—Hemingway got only
$7,500.
I did a couple of uninspired pictures for 20th Century-Fox. It was the only
studio that made me adhere rigidly to the script. There was one director
whose name I won’t mention—a grizzled old veteran, and a nice man. I once
asked him how to read a certain line and he said helplessly: “Ask me anything
but that!”
I met Marilyn Monroe while doing a picture at 20th. It was in the makeup
department and Jean Peters was there. Jean—who had been a schoolteacher be¬
fore becoming an actress—was much more attractive to me than Marilyn. The
latter was quite young then and hadn’t reached her notorious acclaim. She was
undulating her lips, putting on lipstick, and she was very agreeable.
I said something to her and Jean Peters questioned my grammar. That was
one of the nadir points of my career, to have my grammar corrected in front of
Marilyn Monroe. Jean is now married to Howard Hughes, which amounts to
total commitment.
Years ago my wife and 1 and some guests were in Chasen’s restaurant when
a slovenly attired man came in and said hello to me. I cut him dead.
Someone said, “That was Howard Hughes.”
Just to reveal my lack of character, I got up, went to his table, and shook hands
with him.
Howard Hughes’ whims and indulgences make any other Hollywood char¬
acter look like a pigmy.
When he had a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he parked his car on the
street overnight, which is against the police regulations. A friend of mine who
lived in another bungalow there told me that he couldn’t figure it out. He
couldn’t park his car overnight without getting a ticket and he wondered how
Howard Hughes could. Then he discovered the answer. Every month Hughes
would send a large check to the Beverly Hills police station, for the fines. He
parked without worry for two years.
746 Hollywood
When July Garland had her weekly television shows in 1963, her voice became
wobbly and she had depleted herself by taking off too much weight. But she’s a
vocal sorceress whose range—at its best—has a deep, interior vibrancy of great
emotional urgency. Strangely enough, her medium and soft palates are not in¬
teresting. She has no great variety of expression; she’s more Sarah Bernhardt
than Eleonora Duse. Judy has become the living F. Scott Fitzgerald of song.
Arthur Freed is the best producer of musical pictures in the history of Hol¬
lywood, although he’s eccentric and has his careless quirks. Arthur, a former
songwriter, named two of his pictures after his songs. When he produced Pagan
Love Song, he forgot to put the song he’d written into the picture. Louis B. Mayer
had to remind him.
L.B. was a rather humorless man and 1 never saw him laugh. But if you had
an idea and if he was back of the producer, he was a gambler and the money
flowed.
Mayer had a private dining room off the commissary at M.G.M., where the
feature was L.B. Mayer’s matzoth-ball soup. He had a consuming passion for
food.
Once, when he was courting a girl, he arrived at her door beaming with ex¬
citement, his hands behind his back.
“Guess what I’ve got!” he cried.
No doubt the lady expected furs or jewels.
“Give up?” he asked, then displayed his surprise. He had a plucked uncooked
chicken in each hand.
In the 30’s, George Kaufman used to sing a song called, “I’d rather have TB
than LB.” But L.B. was a rather formidable man physically and he had a terrible
temper. (I think he even had fistfights with John Barrymore in the 20’s.)
Betty Comden and Adolph Green were once ushered into his office and L.B.
went into his favorite chant. He started singing “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” at
the top of his voice. Then he said to Adolph and Betty, “Where are the songs of
yesteryear?”
Adolph and Betty shrugged helplessly, then looked under the table. Adolph
said, “Yeah, where are they?”
Mayer was always complaining about a picture that King Vidor made about
1929. He said that Vidor had had the gall to show a natural function. He was re¬
ferring to the fact that Vidor had shown a toilet—a hideous idea to L.B. Indeed,
it was so repellent that he’d bring it up every few weeks for years. “Don’t show
the natural functions!” he’d warn everyone.
Oscar Levant
747
Several years ago my friend Goddard Lieberson, President of Columbia Records,
returned from Europe and raved to Freed about the great art galleries there.
Arthur listened, then rejoined, “If you really want to see paintings, you
should see Bill Goetz’ collection.”
In 19 j i, Goddard, who had made a recording of Porgy and Bess, came out to
California and June and I took him to visit the Freeds. Then we were going on
to the Gershwins’ to play the record for the first time. No one had heard it.
Arthur Freed, who has an obsessive compulsion to know everything first,
asked, “How long does the record take?”
Goddard said, “Three hours.”
Freed promptly replied, “Yes, I know”—which was mystifying.
Again, he came to my house one afternoon when I was watching a big foot¬
ball game on television.
“What are you watching?” he asked.
I replied, “A football game.”
“I saw it,” said Freed.
I was with Arthur and Bill Perlberg, another producer, late one night when
Perlberg spoke of a certain property on which he claimed he had first refusal.
Freed whispered in my ear, “I have first refusal too.”
As a producer, Freed dominates the scene always. At the beginning of American
in Paris he announced, “We won’t have any concert music. 1 don’t want any lulls
in this picture.” This was directed at me.
I was heartbroken. Ten minutes later I came up with the idea of the ego fan¬
tasy where I play the Gershwin Piano Concerto, act as the conductor, play the
other instruments and at the conclusion sit in a box and cheer myself.
But I was afraid to tell this to Freed, because of his decision.
However, I did tell the fantasy idea to Vincente Minnelli, who persuaded
Arthur to use it; Raoul Dufy, the great painter, later told Freed that it was his
favorite scene in the picture.
The Gershwin score for that picture was extraordinary and included some
rather obscure songs that were little known or sung. One was called “By Strauss,”
and during rehearsal I played it for Gene Kelly, who was also the choreogra¬
pher.
I did the Viennese afterbeat—I don’t know how to describe it; the second
beat precedes the real beat. 1 had learned my Strauss waltzes from Max Drey¬
fus.
Kelly asked, “Where is that in the music?”
We had quite a fight, but our differences were resolved and we finally
achieved an agreeable relationship.
748 Hollywood
Gene did “I Got Rhythm” in a very unique and original way by using children.
And the woman in the scene in which “By Strauss” was sung was an aged flow-
erwoman in a bistro whom Gene grabbed and swung into a rather tepid waltz
that tore at your heartstrings. As talented as he is, Gene is not averse to a good
dose of corn now and then.
I asked Jack Cole, the great dancer and choreographer, how he liked the
choreography.
He said, rather bitterly, “With old women and children, how can you miss?”
American in Paris was Leslie Caron’s first picture—Gene Kelly had discovered
her in France and she was brought over with much publicity. After I had met
her, June asked me what she looked like.
“She looks too much like me as far as I’m concerned,” I replied.
My daughter Amanda looks a little like her.
After my heart attack in 195 2 ,1 worried about not getting well in time to do
another picture, Bandwagon, for Arthur Freed. It featured Fred Astaire, Cyd
Charisse, Jack Buchanan and me. Comden and Green had written the book, the
music was comprised of old songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, ex¬
cept for one new number called “That’s Entertainment.” Michael Kidd was the
choreographer.
The picture started six weeks after my heart attack, but I was able to work.
It was the only picture I’d ever done in which I wasn’t a bachelor; I was mar¬
ried to Nanette Fabray. 1 treated her atrociously—just as though she were in¬
deed my real wife.
Jack Buchanan played the role of an actor-director-impresario. A scene in the
script had him walking off-stage in the makeup of Oedipus Rex, gouged-out eyes,
bloody face and all, and his line was “Get me a hot pastrami on rye.” That was
the extent of the scene.
Minnelli decided to embellish it by showing Buchanan onstage doing the role
of Oedipus.
He became so carried away by the idea that he wrote to the widow of Yeats
asking for Yeats’ version of Oedipus. When he didn’t receive a reply he hired Nor¬
man Corwin to adapt a few scenes. He also engaged Louis Calhem to coach
Buchanan in the role of Oedipus. The shooting required many days.
Obviously it was folly to interrupt a musical show with a large portion of
tragedy so the only part that remained in the finished picture was the original
scene requesting a pastrami sandwich.
Oliver Smith, the great scenic designer, did the brilliant sets for Bandwagon.
When he was very young, Oliver hadbeen an usher atthe Roxy Theatre in New
York—a monstrous building with a complicated inside light system controlled
from an airport-like tower that signaled the ushers about the availability of seats.
On a certain Saturday night with the usual long line of people waiting to gain
access, Oliver, choking with nausea about the militaristic regimentation of his
Oscar Levant
749
job, decided to quit then and there. As a parting gesture he threw open the doors
to the crowd, creating confusion and bedlam as the lights flashed wildly on and
off in a dazzling concerto of meteors.
We were rehearsing the end of “That’s Entertainment,” a number where we
had to walk down a long ramp, taking large strides at great speed. The physical
effort involved worried me and when I told my doctor about this he said not to
do it. At the next rehearsal I refused to do it, so in great disgust Fred Astaire
said, “All right. I’ll carry you down.”
So I did it.
I have had the honor of playing with champions. One of the best of these is
Fred Astaire. Several years ago when he was on the Jack Paar show, Fred demon¬
strated gentlemanliness beyond the call of duty.
Paar asked, “Who’s older, you or your sister?”
Without hesitating a second, Fred said he was. The truth is that Adele is his
senior. I thought that was gallant.
Fred and Adele Astaire were the toast of London in 1926, starring in Lady Be
Good, which they’d done in New York previously. I remember how soigne he
looked entering the Kit Kat Club. He was a favorite of the Prince of Wales.
In the early part of World War II, I did a radio show to help sell War Bonds.
I was the moderator and Fred Astaire was a guest. I had him sing a very obscure
song from Lady Be Good called “I Got the You-Don’t-Know-the-Half-of-It,
Dearie, Blues.” That was the first time we ever worked together.
His sister Adele is a very zany character—really quite funny. George Gersh¬
win wrote the score for Funny Face, a musical starring the Astaires, and George
and Adele liked each other. George Jean Nathan was attracted to her also and
it was suspected that that was the reason he gave Gershwin a bad review.
Once Adele and Fred and I had lunch at M.G.M. and I asked Fred, “When
did you become a good dancer?”
“When Adele retired,” he said.
UnlikeFred, Adele usedto swearalot. Fred would never use profanity. He’s
rather prudish—a very cautious fellow about everything. I think he probably
drives slower than anyone in America. When he’s making a picture, he’s a great
worrier, needs constant reassurance. However, he’s not in the least tempera¬
mental and he’s very considerate.
He talked about his youth: he told me of the time when he was about five
years old and was first in vaudeville with Adele. He remembered the rooming-
house in New York where his mother had locked him in. He even remembered
the name of the street it was on.
We were reminiscing about girls andhe spoke of Eleanor Holm. He wastaken
with her but couldn’t get anywhere. There was a famous Follies girl whom he
was mad about.
He told about Frank Fay tapping him on the shoulder and saying, “Lay off that
Hollywood
7S°
one. She’s Faysie’s.” Fred said he was so scared he never went near that girl again.
No one except possibly Ethel Merman has had more great songs written for
him than Fred Astaire. It started with Vincent Youmans’ Flying Down to Rio. Some
of the people who wrote for him were: Con Conrad who wrote “The Conti¬
nental”; Cole Porter, “Night and Day”; Jerome Kern and the Gershwin did the
music for two pictures apiece; Irving Berlin the same for three pictures. Fred
Astaire is the best singer of songs the movie world ever knew. His phrasing has
individual sophistication that is utterly charming.
Presumably the runner-up would be Bing Crosby, a wonderful fellow, though
he doesn’t have the unstressed elegance of Astaire.
Dick Rodgers once told me that he had written for every great star but two—
Fred Astaire and Ethel Merman. 1 don’t understand how Fred Astaire missed
Rodgers.
Groucho Marx
Groucho’s letter to Warner Brothers is probably bis most famous; be was a lifelong corre¬
spondent with the great (T. S. Eliot) and the obscure. I spent some days with him in his
eighty first year, interviewing him for Esquire, and found him as advertised: funny,
crotchety, filled with puns and wisecracks, literate, r fleet ive about life. At the end of our
Jinal meeting, lunch at Le Bistro, 1 strolled with him down the street until he saw a the¬
ater playing a movie he wanted to see. He walked up to the ticket booth and said, "Good
afernoon, I’m Groucho Marx—the living legend. Do you have the nerve to charge me
for a ticket?” They didn’t.
from The Groucho Letters
When the Marx Brothers were about to make a movie called "A Night in Casablanca,” there
were threats of legal action from the Warner Brothers, who, five years before, had made
a picture called, simply, "Casablanca" (with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as
stars). Whereupon Groucho, speaking Jot his brothers and himself, immediately dispatched
thefollowing letters:
Dear Warner Brothers:
Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding
it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated mak¬
ing this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclu¬
sively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our
announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal
document warning us not to use the name Casablanca.
It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-
grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stum¬
bled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later
turned in for a hundred shares of the common), named it Casablanca.
I just don’t understand your attitude. Even if you plan on re-releasing
your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to
distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don’t know whether I
could, but I certainly would like to try.
You claim you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name
without your permission. What about “Warner Brothers”? Do you own
that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what
about Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were.
We were touring the sticks as The Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was
still a gleam in the inventor’s eye, and even before us there had been other
brothers—the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an
outfielder with Detroit; and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” (This was
originally “Brothers, Can You Spare a Dime?” but this was spreading a dime
pretty thin, so they threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other
one and whittled it down to, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”)
Now Jack, how about you? Do you maintain that yours is an original
name? Well, it’s not. It was used long before you were bom. Offhand, I
can think of two Jacks—there was Jack of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and
Jack the Ripper, who cut quite a figure in his day.
As for you, Harry, you probably sign your checks, sure in the belief that
you are the first Harry of all time and that all other Harrys are imposters.
I can think of two Harrys that preceded you. There was Lighthouse Harry
of Revolutionary fame and a Harry Appelbaum who lived on the comer
of 93rd Street and Lexington Avenue. Unfortunately, Appelbaum wasn’t
too well known. The last I heard of him, he was selling neckties at Weber
and Heilbroner.
7J2
Hollywood
Now about the Burbank studio. I believe this is what you brothers call
your place. Old man Burbank is gone. Perhaps you remember him. He
was a great man in a garden. His wife often said Luther had ten green
thumbs. What a witty woman she must have been! Burbank was the wiz¬
ard who crossed all those fruits and vegetables until he had the poor plants
in such a confused and jittery condition that they could never decide
whether to enter the dining room on the meat platter or the dessert dish.
This is pure conjecture, of course, but who knows—perhaps Burbank’s
survivors aren’t too happy with the fact that a plant that grinds out pic¬
tures on a quota settled in their town, appropriated Burbank’s name and
uses it as a front for their films. It is even possible that the Burbank fam¬
ily is prouder of the potato produced by the old man than they are of the
fact that from your studio emerged “Casablanca” or even “Gold Diggers
of 1931.”
This all seems to add up to a pretty bitter tirade, but I assure you it’s
not meant to. 1 love Warners. Some of my best friends are Warner Broth¬
ers. It is even possible that 1 am doing you an injustice and that you, your¬
selves, know nothing at all about this dog-in-the-Wanger attitude. It
wouldn’t surprise me at all to discover that the heads of your legal de¬
partment are unaware of this absurd dispute, for 1 am acquainted with many
of them and they are fine fellows with curly black hair, double-breasted
suits and a love of their fellow man that out-Saroyans Saroyan.
1 have a hunch that this attempt to prevent us from using the title is the
brainchild of some ferret-faced shyster, serving a brief apprenticeship in
your legal department. 1 know the type well—hot out of law school, hun¬
gry for success and too ambitious to follow the natural laws of promotion.
This bar sinister probably needled your attorneys, most of whom are fine
fellows with curly black hair, double-breasted suits, etc., into attempting
to enjoin us. Well, he won’t get away with it! We’ll fight him to the high¬
est court! No pasty-faced legal adventurer is going to cause bad blood be¬
tween the Warners and the Marxes. We are all brothers under the skin
and we’ll remain friends till the last reel of “A Night in Casablanca” goes
tumbling over the spool.
Sincerely,
Groucho Marx
For some curious reason, this letter seemed to puzzle the Warner Brothers legal depart¬
ment. They wrote—in all seriousness—and asked if the Marxes could give them some idea
of what their story was about. They felt that something might be worked out. So Groucho
replied:
Gro uc ho Marx
7S3
Dear Warners:
There isn’t much I can tell you about the story. In it I play a Doctor of Di¬
vinity who ministers to the natives and, as a sideline, hawks can openers
and pea jackets to the savages along the Gold Coast of Africa.
When I first meet Chico, he is working in a saloon, selling sponges to
barflies who are unable to carry their liquor. Harpo is an Arabian caddie
who lives in a small Grecian urn on the outskirts of the city.
As the picture opens, Porridge, a mealy-mouthed native girl, is sharp¬
ening some arrows for the hunt. Paul Hangover, our hero, is constantly
lighting two cigarettes simultaneously. He apparently is unaware of the
cigarette shortage.
There are many scenes of splendor and fierce antagonisms, and Color,
an Abyssinian messenger boy, runs Riot. Riot, in case you have never been
there, is a small night club on the edge of town.
There’s a lot more I could tell you, but I don’t want to spoil it for you.
All this has been okayed by the Hays Office, Good Housekeeping and the
survivors of the Haymarket Riots; and if the times are ripe, this picture
can be the opening gun in a new worldwide disaster.
Cordially,
Groucho Marx
Instead of mollifying them, this note seemed to puzzle the attorneys even more; they wrote
hack and said they still didn 't understand the story line and they would appreciate it if
Mr. Marx would explain the plot in more detail. So Grouch obliged with the following:
Dear Brothers:
Since I last wrote you, I regret to say there have been some changes in the
plot of our new picture, “A Night in Casablanca.” In the new version I play
Bordello, the sweetheart of Humphrey Bogart. Harp and Chico are itin¬
erant rug peddlers who are weary of laying rugs and enter a monastery
just for a lark. This is a good joke on them, as there hasn’t been a lark in
the place for fifteen years.
Across from this monastery, hard by a jetty, is a waterfront hotel,
chockfull of apple-cheeked damsels, most of whom have been barred by
the Hays Office for soliciting. In the fifth reel, Gladstone makes a speech
that sets the House of Commons in a uproar and the King promptly asks
for his resignation. Harpo marries a hotel detective; Chico operates an os¬
trich farm. Humphrey Bogart’s girl, Bordello, spends her last years in a
Bacall house.
754 Hollywood
This, as you can see, is a very skimpy outline. The only thing that can
save us from extinction is a continuation of the film shortage.
Fondly,
Groucho Marx
After that, the Marxes heard no more from the Warner Brothers’ legal department.
Ju l i a Phillips
Julia Phillips rode high in the Hollywood of the 19~JOs as one of the producers ofT axi
Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then she fell hard, into an extended
period of drug abuse, alcoholism, and financial crisis. She is unforgiving toward herself
in her memoir You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (1991), recalling a time
when cocaine played an important role in many movies and deals and yesterday’s wonder
kids became today’s washed-up losers. In the opening pages of her book she remembers Oscar
night of 1974, when her success already contained the seeds of her failure.
from You’ll Never Eat Lunch in
This Town Again
House Lights Dim Before Titles
The Sting had been nominated, two months bfore, in ten categories, including Cine¬
matography, Editing, Actor, Screenplay, Director, and Best Picture. The Exorcist,
which had garnered an equal number of nominations, had been released the same day,
two days bfore Christmas. It had received an enormous amount of initial publicity ; even
The New York Times carried pictures of people lined up in the cold to get in.
Warners had been far too cautious in its release of The Exorcist. It had opened in
only twenty-four theaters. At 90/10 deals, Leo Greenfield kept reminding us. But then,
Julia Phillips
7S 5
he was the guy who told us, based on thefirst week’sfigures, that our picture would gross
maybe fifteen mil. We had opened in 220 theaters, with "JO / 30 deals, and kept widen¬
ing the release. Warners waited a good six weeks until they went wide. But The Exor¬
cist was only a three-week picture; the audience lost interest before it was available.
The Sting, on the other hand, had staying power. It had hung in, week after week,
and it had opened in ten times the number of theaters. Not only was The Sting racking
up some very impressive figures, but people had started to notice that it was an excellent
movie. It certainly didn’t send you out in the street unsure whether to hit a church or a
bar, as The Exorcist did. And Warners had a crack at The Sting and turned us down.
We’d made damn sure John Galley and Dick Shepard came to the one screening Uni¬
versal permitted us bfore the release of the picture. As they were walking out, I collared
Galley, because I knew how much it annoyed him, and asked him how he liked the pic¬
ture.
"I’m going home to slash my wrists, "he said. Good. Supercilious motherfucker.
It would be them or us tonight at the Awards.
Michael and Tony had spent weeks aggravating over whether The Sting would win
for Best Picture or not. They had practiced speeches, how they would stand up, their walks
to the stage. 1 hadn’t dared to contemplate the possibility of winning. 1 was not a big be¬
liever in the power of positive thinking, although 1 had gone to college with Norman Vin¬
cent Peale’s daughter. Didn’t wanna put a mojo on it; didn’t wanna tempt the evil eye.
I translated all my anxiety intofinding a dress. Joel Schumacher was my fashion con¬
sultant. We agreed I was a New York girl, most comfortable in black, and since so many
Californians dressed in colors, that I would probably stand out. Where 1 got the chutz¬
pah to think I might stand out at such a gathering 1 don’t know. We traipsed from store
to store and I would try something on and I would say, "Now if / win ...” and then see
if the dress was comfortable to walk in, and he would pull at a strap and say, “Now, when
you win ...” Wejinally settled on a black spaghetti-strap number by Halston at Gior¬
gio’s, a long strand of pearls, and a double feather boa made up ofguinea hen and black
ostrich feathers.
I was still, six months af ter Kate’s birth, a little wide in the hip. Joel was adamant
that 1 should wear beautiful black sandal-heels but 1 couldn ‘t find any tall enough. 1 needed
height. I ended up buying a pair of giant plaform shoes from Fred Slatten. Black satin
with rhinestones. They stayed hidden under the dress and they definitely gave me height.
They alsofilled me with the quiescent fear that 1 might actually fall off them on global
TV. A toss-up, looks or safety. The hips won out.
Trancas, California
April 2, 1974
I wake with a shudder at six thirty. The sun creates hot bounce on the sky /sea
horizon. It is quite a sight, but I take this view for granted. Without pausing a
7 $6 Hollywood
moment in sincere appreciation, I automatically pop a diet pill. Bad move.
Within twenty minutes, I’m dancing around the sandy living room, neatening
up. I run along the beach, take a perfunctory dip in the freezing-cold Pacific,
race indoors for a brief hot shower.
When I hit the bedroom, Michael is standing on his head, yoga-style, in the
comer of the room. “I gotta pick up my tuxedo,” Michael says, still upside
down. The veins in his temples explode and contract on each syllable. Upstairs,
I hear Kate’s first baby-musings for the day. Sonya heats formula in the kitchen.
I can smell it. I don’t know how Kate can stand that shit.
“Good, that’ll give me time to be nervous all by myself. Maybe Sonya could
take Kate out for awhile.” As in: I. NEED. MY. SPACE. . . .
Within the hour, they’re toast. I lay out some coke on a small mirror. Secret
stash. Mine. Michael doesn’t even know I have it . . . that’s how it’s gotten. I
chop it lightly with a razor. It falls apart like butter. This is good coke. Smooth.
I do a hit, then another. I roll a joint and smoke it out on the deck. Less than a
hundred yards from me, the ocean beats down in heavy waves against the sand.
I pace, my heart beating in triple time to the waves.
I watch the postal van ease its way toward our mailbox, vault over the deck,
and scramble down the hill to meet it. The mailman has a stack, bills mostly,
junk mail addressed to Occupant. Sandwiched between the telephone bill and
the latest issue of Time is a small blue envelope. The handwriting addressing
Michael and Julia Phillips is familiar. I tear open the envelope as I return to the
house, yelling “Thanks” over my shoulder to the mailman's wishes for our good
luck that night. The letter is short and pithy, my favorites:
Dear Michael & Julia:
In a few days, you will be getting cards and letters and telegrams from everyone,
so I wanted to get in what I had to say now. The important thing to remember
is that you are nice sweet people. You are about to have a lot of temptation thrown
your way, so try not to forget that.
Love,
John
Maybe too pithy. The letter upsets me; just now, Michael and I are nice sweet
people to everybody but each other. Marriage . . . Here today, gone today. I
pop half a Valium and look at my shaking hands. Shut up, I tell them.
When they do, I set about the arduous process of blow-drying my hair, then
spicing it up with a curling iron. I swallow another three Valium halves and re¬
curl my hair as a chaser each time until it is time to get dressed. After I’m dressed,
I have a little coke as a chaser for all that Val out of my secret stash. I don’t offer
Michael any. It would provoke a fight I’m not into fighting with Michael tonight.
Julia Phillips
7S7
Universal has been kind enough to provide a limousine for us and Tony and
Antoinette Bill, and David Ward and his wife, Chris. When I first met Antoinette
Bill, everybody called her Mrs. Tony. Her given name was Antoinette, but she
had gone under the name Toni all her life. Tony, who was in actual fact nee Ger¬
ard Anthony Bill, was also called Tony. Somehow, Tony stayed and Toni be¬
came Mrs. Tony. I, of course, was outraged.
“You sound like his chattel,” I told her at lunch at Ma Maison one day. I had
just had my lip and legs painfully waxed by Charlotte at Elizabeth Arden’s, which
was making me bristle. The fact that Patrick had the restaurant wrapped in poly¬
ethylene, something my father participated in inventing, and that it was a hot
day with too little air conditioning, might also have added to my dyspeptic
worldview. “Isn’t there something else I can call you?”
She smiled. “Well, my real name is Antoinette, but I always thought it was
pretentious.”
“Maybe when you were ten, but you’re a grown-up married lady now with
two kids and a husband named Gerard who likes to be called Tony, not that I
blame him. I’m gonna call you Antoinette from now on. Okay?” I still asked per¬
mission in certain matters . . .
She grinned and flushed. “Why not? What the hell!” She laughed and toasted
me with a glass of dry white wine.
I started calling her Antoinette; pretty soon some other people started
calling her Antoinette; after awhile everyone but Tony called her Antoinette.
One day she went out and had her checks, credit cards, license, passport—
everything identifying her—changed to Antoinette Bill. I felt as good that day
as I did the day Michael’s mother, Sherry, started getting paid for finding the
dresses that Michael’s father, Larry, knocked off in his lower-priced dress line.
I was a fucking one-woman consciousness-raising session . . .
Michael and I have to be the first to leave because we’re in Trancas, which is as
far away from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as you can be, and still live in the
county of L. A. David and Chris live in Topanga Canyon, so we pick them up on
the way into town. There is something very silly about being all duded up at
three o’clock in the afternoon, sitting in the back of a stretch limo, but the door
will be closed, the Academy has reminded us in numerous missives preceding
the event, at six thirty promptly.
We have already split up Bill/Phillips Productions and there’s bad blood
between Tony and us. This isn’t to become known until we are. Tony de¬
cides to drive himself and meet us there. He doesn’t want to be Hollywood
and arrive in a limo. If you really feel that way, I think, why go at all? Be¬
cause we’re going to win. This concept makes me as nervous as the thought
of losing.
7J8
Hollywood
A limo provided by the studio for the producers and the writer is a truly
grandiose gesture, given all previous behavior by Universal. Basically we have
been treated as a nasty inconvenience to be just barely tolerated. By Zanuck and
Brown. By George Roy Hill. Mostly by those who live in the Black Tower, some¬
times referred to locally as the Black Mariah, the reflector-sunglass mausoleum
that houses all the Universal Executives, both living and dead. To them, our
youth, so chic at some of the other studios, is an impudence.
The day the nominations came out, and both those who had made American
Graffiti and The Sting, a ubiquitously young group, had snagged an incredible num¬
ber of honors for Universal, we received telegrams from the top two execs at
Universal: Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg.
SINCEREST CONGRATULATIONS AND BEST WISHES FROM ALL OF US AT UNIVERSAL FOR
TEN ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS, INCLUDING BEST PICTURE, FOR THE STING. LEW
R. WASSERMAN
Not warm, but essentially correct.
CONGRATULATIONS FOR THE ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATION FOR AMERICAN GRAFFITI.
THE FILM IN OUR JUDGEMENT IS AN AMERICAN CLASSIC AND DESERVING OF ALL OF ITS
ACCOLADES. LET’S HOPE THERE ARE OTHER VENTURES THAT WE CAN SHARE WITH YOU
IN THE FUTURE. SID SHEINBERG
Not warm, and incorrect in all its essentials.
I have this image of Sid’s secretary: Well, all young people look alike, don’t
they? I’ve always wondered if the message Western Unioned to George Lucas
congratulated him on the receipt of so many nominations for The Sting. I won¬
der if he kept his, too . . .
And now, here we are: Chris and David and Michael and Julia, flying along the
Pacific Coast Highway, compliments of Universal Airlines, to the Dorothy
Chandler Pavilion. I have nibbled another half a Valium at the Wards’. I’ve de¬
cided it’s okay to carry Valium to the Academy Awards. Most of the people in
the Academy are from the Valium-and-Alcohol Generation. I’m becoming a tad
too relaxed behind it, though. Sleepy might be a better word.
Need a little hit, I think, as my head lolls around on my neck. Need a big hit,
I amend. You have a big hit. The Sting. . . Not that kind of a hit. . . maybe cof¬
fee. If nothing else was around. I’m pissed at myself for leaving my secret stash
behind. I focus on getting downtown, like that’s going to make the drive quicker.
By the time we reach the exit to the Music Center, limousines are backed up
onto the ramp. Behind us they stack up quickly. Limos to the left of me, limos
Julia Phillips
7£9
to the right. A limo! A limo! My kingdom for a limo! It is a boiling-hot day and
all the air conditioners are blasting. The hot and the cold mingles with the poi¬
sonous air; the exhaust makes a greenish brown cloud that hangs over us. I feel
I am in line for the funeral of the most popular guy in Hollywood. Who could
that be, I wonder . . .
The limousines, the cloud, the heat, make me think: We are all going to die.
A thought I have two, maybe three hundred times a day anyway. I concentrate
on Life and it makes me realize I have to pee semi-badly. At the rate we’re mov¬
ing, I won’t get to check my makeup. I know the only part of my face that is
glowing with health right now is my shiny forehead.
It’s ridiculous to worry about how I look. There’s a long red carpet; it is the
only route to the door. The door that closes promptly at six thirty! There are
barricades and cops and fans and photographers. Everywhere. We do not rate
a flicker. There is nothing quite like being the only unknown in a bevy of lumi¬
naries. Unless it is to be the only name at a gathering of nobodies. If I had to
vote for the lesser of two evils, as I do for my president, I’d go with anonymity.
But I didn’t know that then.
We walk along that red carpet, graced by Sally Kellerman in front of us and
Paul and Linda McCartney behind us. Nobody reaches out to us. No Army
Archerd interview. No hail-fellow-well-met interchange with milling celebs. An
all-time Humbler. A year or two before, I’d have been amazed to be here. Now
that I am, I can see that the only way to attend one of these events is as a star.
We traverse the gauntlet in that casual way that says: I don’t care to be noticed.
I feel like a walk-on in a high-school play.
Of course, Tony and Antoinette are here already. We see Tony chatting up
Steve Shagan, who’s in competition with David Ward for Best Screenplay, and
drinking, from the look around his mouth, his third glass of wine. He looks pretty
cool in his tux. He looks like he belongs. Shagan insincerely wishes us luck. That’s
okay, I forgive him. He’s insisted we hire Norman Garey, who acts as our
lawyer and is truly our friend. I shift back and forth, no small feat on platforms
four inches from the ground in the toe and probably six in the heel. It gives me
the illusion that I am taking steps, presumably away, from a situation that makes
me uncomfortable.
People are chatting, waving, drinking. Mostly they are checking their watches.
I have felt the same palpable heat of anticipation on only two other occasions:
The Band of Gypsies concert, New Year’s Eve, 1968. Probably the last live Jimi
Hendrix performance. The Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden in 1972.
The tour that ended at Altamont. . .
People make their way to their seats. Apparently NBC or the Academy, who¬
ever is running the show, expects The Sting and the The Exorcist to run neck and
760
Hollywood
neck because nominated personnel for each film fill up the first three rows on
opposite sides of the aisle. Gives me pause about Price-Waterhouse.
The very first production number features Liza. She’s fabulous. Getting to
be a real show stopper. Like Mama, which is what she always calls her famous
mother. She’s been Tony’s friend for a long time, and Michael and I have met
her a few times: once or twice, in fact, as a guest at our house at the beach. We
introduced her to Redford out there. When she finishes, she winks at us. The
ordeal we’re about to endure for the longest hours of all my hours seems a bit
more personal, more friendly.
To be perfectly fair, though, I had been partaking from a panoply of mood
enhancers, stimulants, and depressants all day. Every once in awhile, I would
strike upon the perfect chemical combination: for Oscar night it’s been a diet
pill, a small amount of coke, two joints, six halves of Valium, which makes three,
and a glass-and-a-half of wine. So far. I have a warm and comfortable feeling of
well-being.
This is greatly enhanced by The Sting picking up some awards. Best Editing.
Best Music. Bill Reynolds and Marvin Hamlisch make nice acceptance speeches.
They even thank us. Best Screenplay! David Ward, our pal, has won! My heart
begins to samba in my chestal cavity. I hope it doesn’t embarrass me by ex¬
ploding. At least not before we win. If we win. I can barely hear David’s ac¬
ceptance speech over my internal din. Boomalacka Boomalacka . . .
One of the TV crew rushing around in front of me slips on some cable and
steps on my foot. Hard. Just keeps going, too. Doesn’t even apologize. He’s
with the team telecasting the event to one hundred million people or so, and he
has more important things on his mind . . . he’s only behaving the way every¬
body in The Business does: all is sacrificed on the altar of the show. Hey, what-
ever’s good for the project. . . .
If you’re fucking over your partner for the good of the project, that’s differ¬
ent from just plain fucking him over. In fact, if you’re fucking him over just for
the hell of it, but you can make it seem like it’s for the good of the project, you’re
applauded for being “professional.” This poor son of a bitch is hurting my toes
because they’re in his way. He has to step on my feet for the good of the show.
He does it to me several times during the course of the festivities; I’m finally
forced to grab him by his bow tie and browbeat an apology and a promise from
him that he won’t do that anymore.
My mind is starting to wander and my mouth is getting dry and I have to take
another nerve-pee. I know it’s okay to get up and walk out because people have
been doing it steadily throughout the night. The reason that we never see this
on TV is that the second anybody vacates a seat, one of the staff working on the
show, all of whom are dressed in formal attire, sits in the empty seat.
I clunk my way to the ladies’ room in the Fred Slatten platforms. I promise,
Julia Phillips
761
Joel, I’ll never go against you again. In the fashion department. The bar in the
lounge holds Jack Lemmon up. Aloft. As it were. He waves as I pass. He doesn’t
know me at all. But he waves. Nice guy . . .
I pee, fix hair, remove shine from forehead, reapply lipstick. Have a hit of
coke which I scrape from the inside of my purse. A little leftover from the last
big occasion. Probably New Year’s Eve. Swallow half a Valium dry. Check in
the mirror. Perfect. I stop at the bar for a glass of water. On the loudspeaker I
can hear the nominees for Best Actress being announced.
“We’dbetter go back in,” Jack says merrily. “Our tdme’scomingup.” He takes
my ann ceremoniously and walks me to the door. When we step through, we
are engulfed in darkness.
“Someone’s sitting in our seats,” I whisper.
“No problem,” he says vaguely and drops my arm. He ambles to his seat and
sits on the NBC stand-in’s lap. It gives me a giggle and the giggle gives me a rush.
I edge my way back to my seat in the darkness. It is empty.
I study my program .It’s just Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture. Red-
ford’s nominated for The Sting, but he doesn’t win. Jack Lemmon does, for Save
the Tiger, Shagan’s picture. Based on our relationship at the bar, I feel person¬
ally involved, a tad miffed when he doesn’t thank me. Redford doesn’t attend
and he’s assigned Eileen Brennan, a featured player in the picture, to accept on
his behalf; I think he should have assigned me, so deep down I’m glad he hasn’t
won. Even if he is in my movie. I am at the onset of what I think of as my Hol¬
lywood Period.
Everything about John Huston, presenter of the award for Best Director, is
long: the tails of his jacket, his face, his vowels, his speech. He’s drunk and hurls
invective in a series of unfinished sentences at the audience for a good five min¬
utes. This can be a v-e-e-r-y long time if you’re just a category away from
knowing if you’ve won an Oscar or not. Outside of president, or mondomondo
rock ’n’ roll star, it doesn’t get much better for shallow capitalist American
youth.
“And they tell the winners, Don’t take too much time,” Michael whispers.
We laugh and squeeze clammy hands. Finally, Houston reads the nominees for
the Best Director. And the winner is . . . George Roy Hill.
As George walks up the stairs to the stage, he winks at us. I look across the
aisle and catch a brief glimpse of Billy Friedkin, nominated as Best Director for
The Exorcist. His face seems a twisted portrait. Tentative title: Hatred and Loss.
Not his fault. It’s a guy thing.
During the course of the evening, the atmosphere of the Dorothy Chandler
Pavilion has deteriorated to something fetid, not unlike the air in Tijuana. If you
consider that a good portion of the audience is filled with nominees, you can
imagine that the losing vibes become more and more profound as the ceremonies
7 62
Hollywood
wear on. With each passing category, there are more and more—let us call them
“nonwinners”—in the crowd. It’s a wonder they can applaud at all, I think.
RE: the quintessential Hollywood gathering: incredible glamour—jewels,
furs, limos—accompanied by the stench of loss.
DavidNiven comesoutto introduce Elizabeth Taylor, who is presenting the
award for Best Picture. Just as she is about to enter from stage right, a streaker
cuts in front of her, runs naked across the stage. People shriek and cheer and
howl when David Niven says something to the effect that there’s a man making
much ado about very little. When, somewhat shakily, Liz finally makes her en¬
trance, she receives a standing ovation. As Michael and Tony stand, they but¬
ton up their tuxedo jackets.
“Just remember Cabaret,” I hiss into Michael’s ear as we applaud. It won in
all categories last year, but The Godfather won for Best Picture. Al Ruddy kept
saying over and over, “You really had us worried there,” and thanked Peter Bart
and Bob Evans. Never mentioned Francis, the fool. Not the greatest public
speaker. Not the greatest producer either.
Elizabeth Taylor is wearing a pastel sleeveless number. She has lost a con¬
siderable amount of weight. She is ample but still beautiful. She reads the nom¬
inees in her hushed, quasi-English voice. “And the winner is—oh, I’m so
happy —The Sting.”
I turn instinctively toward Michael and Tony, but they’re already out of their
seats and on their way to the stage. I toss my purse to Antoinette, per a pre¬
arrangement.
“See ya later,” I say, and start to rise. Something is keeping me from getting
out of my chair and it is strangling me at the same time. The pearls! They’re
caught on the arm of the chair. Michael has turned back. I’m ready to propel
myself out of the chair and fuck the pearls, but he untangles me instantly. I’m
pissed he’s had to rescue me. I take a breath and reach out for him. The three
of us walk up to the stage holding hands.
Liz steps to one side and puts the single award into my outstretched hands.
I don’t let go of it until it’s wrested from me by an Academy official who says
it has to be engraved. Her eyes really are violet. Tony steps up to the micro¬
phone and says something lame about being in the business for twelve years and
having made all these friends and all this time in the business ... He seems sullen,
and his speech has no beginning and no end. His stepping away from the mike
is the only signal that he is done, and the audience applauds pallidly.
Now it’s my turn. I ease my way to the mike. I feel like I’m in a circus, walk¬
ing on stilts. The lights seem very hot. I’m sweating. I can’t see beyond the first
three rows. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are sitting next to each other in
the first row. I address them. I fix a see-how-I’m-smiling grimace onto the lower
half of my face.
Julia Phillips
763
“You can’t imagine what a trip it is,” I say, “for a nice Jewish girl from Great
Neck to win an Academy Award and meet Elizabeth Taylor all in the same night.”
Jack and Walter are laughing; so is the rest of the audience. I am enfolded
into Liz’s very famous cleavage. WHAT! A! RUSH! For somewhere between
five and thirty seconds.
Michael does a nice wrap-up boogie about David Ward making it possible and
George Roy Hill making it happen. Then he thanks me and Tony for bringing
him into this business. We walk quickly into the wings, where Liza and George
stand waiting.
“It still sage in the middle,” Michael says to George. Liza kisses us. Liz teeters
on very high heels right behind us; those amazing eyes vague somewhere in the
middle distance.
“Has anyone seen my glass?” she whispers. No one has. She finds another. Be¬
yond the darkness backstage is the Press Room, which emanates shafts of hot
bright light. The group propels itself toward the light, moths toward the flame.
Old Liz and old Liza know the bunch to stick with tonight. Most of the pictures
in the papers the next day feature Liz and Liza, even though they aren’t nomi¬
nated for anything. Just now, Liza seems buzzed, Liz drunk, and I am getting
sad.
Wait a second. Is this all there is? I wanna do it over. I feel cheated. Am I
wrong to feel cheated? I feel like crying. I wanna go home. Take off my un¬
comfortable shoes. I wish the pearls had strangled me. I take a morose sip of
Liz’s drink and it makes my lips curl. E-e-e-u-u-uw . . . bourbon. The smell
makes me pukey. The flashbulbs flash and the dumb questions commingle in the
smoky air . . .
The portion of the evening that we spend at dinner at the Beverly Hilton passes
in a blur. Lots of pats on the backs and people who ignored us a week before
making sure to say howdy and congratulations. Hey, life’s a trip . . . and then
you get there.
Several days before, Frank Konigsberg, a heavy-duty agent in television at ICM,
decides he’s throwing us a Win Lose or Draw party. Frank has a house high on
Miller Drive, where if you turn three hundred degrees your eyes are filled with
both the Valley and La Cienega views. The city at night stretches around you,
a land of light; from this high up it looks as if something is really going on down
there. I wonder if attendance would be so high if we had lost.
We get out of the limo and walk toward thehouse and all Young Hollywood
rushes us: Howard Rosenman (“You’ve given a lot of people hope”), Ron Bern¬
stein (“Jewish girl from Great Neck—you’ll go down in the annals of Oscar-
dom”), Don Simpson (“I’ve got some good blow for you upstairs”), John Ptak
764 Hollywood
(“J.P.”), Andrea Eastman (“Big J!”), Paul Schrader (Unintelligible, spoken into
armpit), Steven Spielberg, Peter Boyle, Michelle Phillips, Larry Gordon. Kisses,
kisses, kisses. Behind them, hundreds of yet-to-bes fill the house.
Michelle is first out the door. Michelle is always first; it is her special gift.
She dances around us jubilantly.
Once inside, Michael, Tony, and I quickly separate. Hey, it’s the seventies.
There’s the party downstairs. Hi, howya doin’, getcha’ drink? Laughter. Bass
line. Then there’s the party upstairs. Guys. Drugs. Silence.
I’m upstairs in a jiff.
In all the fuss, I’ve heard Don’s voice the most clearly. Need a hit. Simpson,
Schrader, and Schrader’s agent sit on the edge of the bed, passing around a gram
bottle. In the half-light of the room, I can see coke lines forming around their
mouths and under their cheeks. Why does that hardening always improve a man’s
looks, I wonder. And hurt mine.
They pass the bottle to me; I do two unsatisfying snorts per nostril. The coke
is mediocre. Cut bums its way up my nose. I make a face. Generally, I don’t
like taking other people’s drugs. For many reasons, not the least of which is you
never know what you’re getting. More important: with drugs, it’s always bet¬
ter in the power equation if you give rather than receive. Particularly if you’re
a woman. Particularly with coke.
“I’m going downstairs,” I blurt, and I’m out the door.
Antsy, I keep moving through and around people. I feel the incessant pound¬
ing of a heavy rock bass line coming from somewhere far away. Probably the
next room. It syncopates with the throb of excitement around me. Now I’m
being hugged and congratulated by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Joan
wraps herself around me gracefully. In her prof ound childish whisper, sadly, “F m
so happy for you.”
“Darling,” John bellows.
They are drinking. I remember the first time I had dinner at their house. I’d
let John Dunne mix my drinks. By the time the main course was served I was
on my knees in the bathroom throwing up into the toilet. Jews shouldn’t
drink, I thought. Jews were not meant to drink. Drugs, money, sex, and danc¬
ing they could be good at, but rarely drinking. You had to learn that from child¬
hood.
Since I was in their bathroom anyway, I checked their medicine cabinet. I al¬
ways like to do that in a new house. Outside of my mother’s, it was the most
thrilling medicine cabinet I had ever seen. Ritalin, Librium, Miltown, Fioranol,
Percodan . . . every upper, downer, and in-betweener of interest in the TDK,
circa 1973.
“I got your letter this morning,” I say to him as he hugs me warmly. He
blushes. “I’ve got it in my purse,” I lie. I move off toward the bass line.
Julia Phillips
7 6 S
“You don’t really?” He’s very pleased. He shouts after me but I’m out of ver¬
bal range. I turn, I nod, and I keep going . . .
Michael and Tony and I converge in the front hall of the house. What time is it?
I want to know. Three thirty, Michael says. He is the only one wearing a watch.
“Let’s hit it!” we say simultaneously. We’ve been split for months and haven’t
hung out much; tonight hasn’t been a terrifically connecting experience, but here
it is. Another case of three-way mindlink. It has kept us going for longer than
we should stay. And here in this stranger’s front hall, at a party that this stranger
is throwing for our victory, we experience that mindlink again.
“I’ll just get my purse,” I say, escaping the moment by running up the stairs.
Just one little hit for the road. Something to take away this sad little feeling. The
boys haven’t moved from the edge of the bed.
“Anything left?”
“Sure,” Don says coldly, and hands me a glassine package that must have held
an eighth at the beginning of the evening. The gram bottle has been retired, out
of stash, probably hours ago. I stick the fingernail of the pinky on my right hand
into the bag carefully.
It feels grainy. Like sand. I am just a speck of sand under the fingernail of a
larger being . . . This is not my favorite way to do coke. Maybe I just don’t like
sticking my finger up my nose in front of people. I do a hasty two and two. Kiss
them in the general vicinity of their cheeks. Grab my purse. Leave.
Michael, Tony, and Antoinette are in the limo already. “Where did David
and Chris go?” I realize suddenly I haven’t seen them for hours.
“Chris got pissed off because David was getting too much attention,” Michael
says. “They left hours ago. Harry took them home.”
Somewhere during the course of the evening, we’ve gotten on a first-name
basis with the limo driver, probably after we won. Why should the limo driver
be different from anyone else in Hollywood? When we drop the Bills off, we
hug and kiss and feel warm toward each other. Michael and I huddle together
in the backseat and Harry zooms up the Pacific Coast Highway. It is nearly five
ay-em. Dawn is coming on. We’re hitting the beaches of Puerto Vallarta today.
This afternoon.
“Should we bother to sleep?” I ask.
“Nah. Let’s pack and split.”
“I’m not gonna take anything with me.” Michael knows I mean no drugs.
“Good idea,” he says. We’d had some end-of-a-long-night-doing-coke fights.
Nothing heavy, just enough to be scary. Ugly epithets exchanged. Perhaps a crys¬
tal piece or two thrown against a wall. Along day, here and there, of silent tears.
“Good idea,” I repeat, trying it out. It doesn’t sound too threatening. “Def-
766 Hollywood
initely using this time to clean up,” I say. We’ll be staying a week, per a plan we
made together in happier times, not so long ago. I’ll pass through my thirtieth
birthday in five days, on foreign soil. I just hope I won’t be deathly ill by then.
I always get sick in Mexico.
I sit up. The sun creeps over the edge of the waves. It splashes the sea with
an astonishing kaleidoscope of phosphorescent hues; an acid vision on the natch.
Flashback to the first time I tried acid: I sat next to a pool for hours, completely
enveloped in the changes on the surface of the water.
When we get home, we watch the sun come up, then fall asleep in our
clothes. I awake with a start to the harsh persistent ringing of a phone. From its
peremptory tone, I assume it is my mother. I pick up the phone anyway. Sur¬
prise!
“Well, well, how do you do,” my mother-in-law, Sherry Phillips, chirps. In¬
stinctively I turn to hand the phone to Michael, but I am alone in the bed. “Just
a second,” I say, covering the mouthpiece. “Michael,” I holler, “your parents.”
From somewhere down the hall in the living room, I hear him cooing to Kate.
He picks up the other extension. Michael’s parents tell us how proud they are
and how excited they are and how cute we looked. Very supportive, everything
one could ask for in parents. But I don’t respect them, so their support doesn’t
count.
I take off my clothes and hang them up. I cream my face and wipe off
last night’s makeup. I scrutinize my face in the mirror. I look a hundred years
old.
I swallow a diet pill and head out to the garage. I retrieve our one decent suit¬
case from a pile of stuff that we’ve shipped from New York City but never un¬
packed. Peter Boyle, who is renting Margot Kidder’s and Jennifer Salt’s house
down the block, is walking slowly, deliberately, up our driveway. He looks like
someone with a lot on his mind. When he sees me, he shoots me a reluctant
smile. Wordlessly he takes the suitcase from me.
“Soooooo, whaddya think?” I ask as he lugs the suitcase down the hall to our
bedroom. Sonya is making the bed. She smiles at me, something she does rarely.
I guess she’s proud. “I need some coffee,” I say and point Peter toward the liv¬
ing room. Let’s join Michael and Kate and leave Sonya to her chores.
Peter hugs Michael. Kate gurgles up at him.
“So, whaddya think?” Michael asks.
“I think that you should prepare yourself for a real education,” Peter says se¬
riously. “You’re about to lose a lot of friends.”
“Why?”
“Because people really like you best when you’re struggling . . . when you’re
on the way up.”
Michael and I are shocked into silence.
Julia Phillips
767
“The only thing they like better is if you’re on the way down. That’s the only
way you have to go now.”
“Hey, c’mon,” Michael protests. “We’re nowhere near where we plan to be.”
“I’m just telling you the awful truth.” Peter shrugs. “But, hey, what the hell
do I know . . .”
The phone rings sharply. This time, no question, it’s my mother. Both my
parents are on the phone. They start out very excited. They liked the speeches.
They want to know everything about the evening.
“I presume you wore the chicken feathers because you thought they were
glamorous,” my mother says sourly.
“What are you going to do for an encore?” my father asks.
Is this to be a stereophonic assault?
“Some women were talking about your speech in the elevator this morning,”
my mother adds, just for encouragement, “and decided you must be the daugh¬
ter of someone in the business . . .” Hey, where’s my congrats? Oh, I guess they
forgot. And what about the L-word? It isn’t mentioned, although the call is a
long one. Not once . . .
For the next ten days, Michael and I try to reconcile in Puerto Vallarta. I sit
in the sun too long and get a rash all over my body, necessitating a house call
from a local doctor, who administers a shot of cortisone amidst a torrent of Span¬
ish. I return with an arcane flu, which swells just about every major lymph node
in my system, and spend the next six weeks in solemn retreat in my bed.
When it passes, I go back to work with a vengeance, ignoring Kate, ignor¬
ing Michael. Ignoring, most of all, myself. I do things that are harmful to my
health. I drive too fast. I alter my consciousness with whatever is around, usu¬
ally pot and coke, constantly. I openly tempt losers and bad guys and comedy
writers.
Over the next couple of months, my relationship with Michael deteriorates
beyond redemption and we separate.
July 29, 1974.
It is just two days before our eighth wedding anniversary.
Everything that rises must break up . . .
Title Up:
768 Hollywood
R.ober.t Stone
Robert Stone is a novelist with some knowledge of Hollywood; bis novels Hall of Mirrors
and Dog Soldiers were made into the films WUSA and Who’ll Stop the Rain? In
Children of Light, be set much of the action on a troubled Mexicanfilm location, where
a scene involving a character walking into the sea has inspired the filmmakers to consider
what previous walking-into-the-sea movies they can steal from.
from Children of Light
In a pink palazzo at the top of the hill, the Drogues and their womenfolk were
whiling away the afternoon watching films in which people walked into the sea
and disappeared forever. They had watched Bruce Dem in Coming Home, Joan
Crawford in Humoresque, James Mason in the second A Star Is Born and Lee
Verger in The Awakening. Now Fredric March and Janet Gaynor were on the out-
sized screen before them. March stood clad in his bathrobe in the character of
Norman Mayne.
"Hey, "he called to Janet Gaynor. "Mind fl take just one more look?"
Old Drogue picked up the remote-control panel and stopped the frame. His
eyes were filled with tears.
“Listen to me,” he told the others, “this guy was the greatest screen actor of
all time. That line—the emotion under it—controlled—played exactly to movie
scale. There was never anyone greater.”
Joy McIntyre lay on some heaped cushions beside him, weeping unashamedly.
“Wellman was good,” the younger Drogue said.
“The vulnerability,” old Drogue said, “the gentleness, the class of the man.
Never again a Fredric March. What a guy!” He let the film proceed and settled
back with head on Joy’s bare belly. “You see what I mean, sweetheart?” the old
man asked his young friend. But Joy was too overcome to reply.
Robert Stone
769
“Look at the nostrils on Gaynor,” young Drogue said. “She acted with her
n
nose.
“Do I have to remind you that she started before sound?”
“I love it,” Patty Drogue said. “Before sound."
“She was ultra-feminine,” old Drogue said.
The younger Drogue studied the images on the screen.
“Her face suggests a cunt,” he said.
The old man sighed.
“I don’t know why it does,” young Drogue said. “It just does.”
“You’re a guttersnipe,” Drogue senior said.
“Something about the woman’s face, Dad. It makes a crude but obvious ref¬
erence to her genitals.”
“Some people are brought up in poverty,” the old man said, “and they be¬
come cultivated people. Others grow up spoiled rotten with luxury and become
guttersnipes.”
“Y ou look at her face,” young Drogue declared, “and you think of her pussy.”
His brows were knotted in concentration. “Can that be the primal element in
female sexual attraction? Can it explain Janet Gaynor?”
“People are surprised,” Drogue senior said quietly, “when they find out you
can get sex education lectures at the morgue. They’re not in touch with the mod¬
em sensibility.”
Joy was glaring sullenly at young Drogue. The old man shifted his position,
the better to fondle her.
“What does he mean,” Patty Drogue asked her husband, “sex education lec¬
tures at the morgue?”
“In San Francisco,” young Drogue said absently. “The coroner explains about
bondage. Pops got fixated on this.”
On the screen, Fredric March’s body double was wading toward the setting
sun. This time it was Drogue junior who stopped the frame.
“This one was the best,” his father said smugly. “Of all the walk-into-the-ocean
movies this one was it.”
“In the Mason and Judy Garland,” his son told him, “the Cukor version, the
scene’s exactly the same. Frame for frame.”
“The scene is conditioned by what’s around it. The other one is a Judy Gar¬
land film. Entirely different thing.”
Young Drogue went pensive.
“Well,” he said, “with Judy Garland now, see, she . . .”
“Stop,” his father said sternly. “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever idiotic ob¬
scenities you were about to utter—keep them to yourself. I don’t want to hear
your sexual theories about Judy Garland. I want to go to my grave without hear¬
ing them.”
77 °
Hollywood
“Some of us want to remember Judy the way she was,” Joy McIntyre said
primly.
“Who the fuck asked you?” young Drogue inquired.
Old Drogue kissed Joy on the thigh to soothe her.
“Ours is the best,” the young director declared. “We took a great risk to honor
the author’s intentions. We had to reinvent a virtual chestnut because it was in
the book.”
“You’re lucky you had a strong script,” his father told him.
They watched Norman Maine’s funeral and the end of the film.
“There was another Cukor version, right?” young Drogue asked. “Before
Wellman’s. It had a walk to the water, didn’t it?”
“There was What Price Hollywood? by Cukor. It’s a similar plot but it doesn’t
have anyone in the water.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely certain,” the old man said.
John Wateks
John Waters loves the movies, and more than any other director I can think of, he’s a Jan
as well as a professional. He watches them, remembers them, savors them, and uses his
status as a director to meet his heroes and heroines—sometimes casting such personal fa¬
vorites as Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, and Polly Bergen in his ownfilms. In the opening
chapter of his book Crackpot, he provides a tour of Hollywood that includes stops far off
the beaten path (Maureen's Problem Bras) and familiar sights seen in a new light (the
Chinese Theater at 6:00 A.M., as Natalie Wood’s footprints fill with water). This short
essay suggests, in its own way, as much about the underside of Hollywood as anything
I’ve ever read.
“Tour of L. A.”
Los Angeles is everything a great American city should be: rich, hilarious, of
questionable taste and throbbing with fake glamour. I can’t think of a better place
John Waters
77 i
to vacation—next to Baltimore, of course, where I live most of the time. Since
I don’t make my home in what the entertainment business considers a “real city”
(L.A. or New York), I’m a perpetual tourist, and that’s the best way to travel.
Nobody gets used to you, you make new friends without having to hear any¬
one’s everyday problems, and you jet back still feeling like a know-it-all.
Flying to L.A. is cheap. Make sure you get a window seat, so you can thrill
to the horizon-to-horizon sprawl of this giant suburb and imagine how exciting
it would be to see an earthquake while still airborne. In Sensurround yet.
There are millions of places to stay, either cheap or ridiculously opulent, but
I recommend the Skyways Hotel (9 2^0 Airport Boulevard), located directly
under the landing pattern of every jumbo jet that deafeningly descends into LAX.
“The guests complain, but we’re used to it,” confided the desk clerk on a recent
visit.
Once you’ve checked into Skyways, change into something a little flashier
than usual, then step outside your room and glance up at a plane that looks like
it could decapitate you. If you’re like me and think airplanes are sexy, you
might want to plan a romantic picnic on nearby Pershing Drive. It’s the closest
you can humanly get to the end of the runway, where the giant 747s will scare
the living bejesus out of you as they take off, inches over your head. There’s even
an airport lovers’ lane (the 400 block of East Sandpiper Street), where dates with
split eardrums cuddle in cars as the sound barrier breaks right before their eyes.
It’s time now to rent a car, roll down the windows and prepare for your first
big thrill: the freeways. They’re so much fun they should charge admission.
Never fret about zigzagging back and forth through six lanes of traffic at high
speeds; it erases jet lag in a split second. Turn on the radio to AM—being main¬
stream is what L.A. is all about. If you hate the Hit Parade of Hell as much as I
do, tune in to KRLA, an oldies station that plays real music, and listen for “Wild
Thing,” by the Troggs, which epitomizes everything you’re about to see in
Southern California.
You’re now heading toward Hollywood, like any normal tourist. Breathe in
that smog and feel lucky that only in L.A. will you glimpse a green sun or a brown
moon. Forget the propaganda you’ve heard about clean air; demand oxygen you
can see in all its glorious discoloration. Think of the lucky schoolchildren who
get let out of class for smog alerts instead of blizzards. Picture them revving up
their parents’ car engines in their driveways before a big test the next day.
Turn off the Santa Monica Freeway at La Cienega and drive north. Never look
at pedestrians; they’re the sad faces of L.A., the ones who had their licenses re¬
voked for driving while impaired. When you cross Beverly Boulevard, glance
to the left and you’ll see your first example of this city’s fine architecture, the
Tail O’ the Pup, a hot-dog stand shaped exactly like what it sells. Turn left on
Sunset Boulevard and take in all the flashy billboards created to stroke produc¬
ers’ egos. Be glad that Lady Bird Johnson lost her campaign to rid the nation’s
77 2
Hollywood
highways of these glittery monuments. Wouldn’t you rather look at a giant
cutout of Buddy Hackett than some dumb tree?
Proceed immediately to Trousdale Estates, the most nouveau of the nouveau
riche neighborhoods. If anyone publishes a parody of Architectural Digest, this en¬
clave should make the cover. It’s true state-of-the-art bad taste, Southern Cal¬
ifornia style. Every house looks like Trader Vic’s. Now climb Hillcrest Drive
to the top and shriek in amazement at Villa Rosa, Danny Thomas’ garish estate,
which boasts more security video cameras than the White House. Stop and
gawk and wonder why he’s so paranoid. Who on earth would want to assassi¬
nate Danny Thomas? It wouldn’t even make the front page! Now detour to £90
Arkell Drive for the most outrageous sight of all—a house so overdecorated that
it has curtains on the outside. Can wall-to-wall carpeting on the lawn be far be¬
hind?
When you get to Hollywood, you’ll know it—it looks exactly the way you’ve
always imagined, even if you’ve never seen a photograph. I always head straight
for Hollywood Boulevard. Old fogies like Mickey Rooney are always dumping
on this little boulevard of broken dreams, calling it a cesspool and demanding a
cleanup. But they miss the point. Hollywood is supposed to be trashy, for Lord’s
sake. It helps to arrive around 6 A.M., so you can see the very small and oh-so-
sick band of cultists who gather at Mann’s Chinese Theatre (6925 Hollywood
Boulevard) to witness Natalie Wood’s footprints fill with water as the janitor
hoses down the cement. Proceed up the street to the best newsstand in the
world, the Universal News Agency (1 North Las Palmas Avenue), and pick
up This Is Hollywood, a guidebook that lists all the obvious tourist sights, like Diane
Linkletter ’ s suicide leap (8787 Shoreham Drive, sixth floor) and Kim Novak and
Sammy Davis,Jr.’slovenest(78oT ortuoso W ay). Further along the boulevard,
you might encounter the legless, one-armed white guy who break-dances on the
street for horrified families as they stroll up the Walk of Fame. Look around you
and see all the real-life Angels (as in the film with the catch line “High-school
honor student by day, Hollywood hooker by night”) and the David Lee Roth
impersonators. Marvel at the fact that Hollywood is the only town where every¬
body at least thinks they’re cute.
Frederick’s of Hollywood (6608 Hollywood Boulevard), that famous de¬
partment store for closet hookers, is a must visit, not so much for the polyester
imitations of their once-great line, but for a glimpse of their obscure celebrity
room. There it was, at the top of the stairs, with a tacky star on the door and a
twisted mannequin out front. “What celebrities go in there?” I asked a saleslady,
so hard in appearance I’d swear she ate nails for breakfast. “Oh, you know, Liz
Taylor,” she said with a straight face. “Oh, sure,” I thought, realizing I was deal-
John Waters
111
ing with a Pinocchio in stilettos. “Can I see the inside?” I pleaded. After much
telephoning to various supervisors, I got a grouchy voice on the line that told
me, “It’s just a room.” Finally, amanager, who could only be described as a dame,
agreed to usher me in. “What celebrities come here?” I asked again. “None since
I’ve worked here,” she said, trying to position her body so 1 wouldn’t see her
use a credit card to jimmy open the lock. Finally inside, I felt like a fool. It was
nothing more than a nondescript changing room that looked like it hadn’t been
used in years. Thanking her, I trotted back out to Hollywood Boulevard, feel¬
ing slightly more glamorous.
Since Liberace’s museum is in Las Vegas, I recommend the next best thing:
a visit to the Russ Meyer Museum (3121 Arrow Head Drive; by appointment
only). If any director deserves to live so near the famed Hollywood sign, it’s
this great auteur. Revered for such movies as Mudhoney, Common Law Cabin and
Vixen, featuring female stars with the biggest breasts in the world, Russ is now
at work on his $ 1 .j million ten-hour swan song, The Breast of Russ Meyer. Five
years in the making, with two more to go, Russ’ movie is “an autobiographical
film,” he said, “with condensed versions of all my twenty-three films, with three
ex-wives, five close girlfriends, army buddies and World War II, the most im¬
portant part.” I think he should rename it Berlin Alexandertits.
His museum includes one of the most incredible collections of movie mem¬
orabilia I’ve ever seen. Every wall is covered with astounding posters of all his
movies. Volume after volume of leather-bound scrapbooks chronicle his thirty-
year career. It’s a virtual United Nations of Cleavage. Best yet is the “trophy
room.” There you’ll find a display of memorial plaques, one for each film, list¬
ing titles and credits. Props from each set have been imbedded in the plaques.
There’s Kitten Natividad’s douche bag from Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vix¬
ens, a pair of biker sunglasses from Motor Psycho, even Tura Santana’s famous
black-leather glove from Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
If you’re lucky and a graduate student in Meyerology, the director might take
you to the Other Ball (8 2 j East Valley Boulevard, San Gabriel), an “exotic” danc¬
ing club where he discovered, and still looks for, buxom beauties. Since the
liquor board apparently took away its alcohol license and one of the owners died,
the club is not much fun anymore, but those supervixen types are still there and,
for what it’s worth, totally nude. As we exited, a guy passing by on a motorcy¬
cle yelled, “Pervert!” Now, I’ve been called a pervert before, but it’s refresh¬
ing to be insulted for looking at nude women.
If you want to go farther “beneath the valley,” stop by Maureen of Hollywood
(1308 North Wilton Place), the costume designer for many of Russ’ later
opuses. It’s hard to spot—the front window caved in “when the buiding set¬
tled”—but Maureen, a sweet and charming lady, is still there. Gone is her large
sign, problem bras, indicating not mastectomy cases but undergarments for
7 74 Hollywood
women whose “top wasn’t consistent with their bottom.” Or, as Russ puts it,
“She likes to work with tits. She turns out really interesting things, but not in a
tastef ul way; she’s strictly into sheer, bludgeoning exploitation. She’s one of the
last of the old Hollywood.”
If you’re looking for celebrities, the easiest one to find is Angelyne. She
started her career by erecting giant billboards of herself in Hollywood (corner
of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue), New York and London, dis¬
playing nothing but her likeness and a phone number. Dialing excitedly, I was
thrilled that no one answered the first time—the ultimate in Hollywood atti¬
tude. Looking like a fifties glamour girl gone berserk, Angelyne drives around
town in a hot-pink Corvette, wearing a matching, revealing outfit, blowing kisses
to anyone who looks her way. She cheerfully responds to all comments, from
“We love you, Angelyne!” to “Yo! Sit on my face!” Although she’s making a
record, she’s currently famous for absolutely nothing.
Angelyne has everything it takes to become a star, but she has one fatal flaw:
She has no sense of humor about herself. Every time she is queried about her
past, she claims a “lapse of memory” and says her only heroine is “herself.”
When I asked if she identifies with the great Jayne Mansfield, she blasphemed,
“Jayne went into the fourth dimension and copied me and did a lousy job.” When
she said, “I pride myself that 1 have more sex appeal with my clothes on than
most girls have off,” I wondered who would be attracted to this female female-
impersonator. “I’ve got no competition” and “I’m very intelligent” were a few
of her other humble remarks .Yes, Angelyne is a budding star and a vital part of
the Hollywood community, but she desperately needs a new writer.
Of course, when you think about it, everyone in L. A. is a star. Idling in my car
outside Charo’s house (1801 Lexington Road, Beverly Hills), I spotted Charo’s
plumber, Leroy Bazzarone, pulling away in the company truck (John K. Keefe,
Inc., Plumbing and Appliances, 9221 West Olympia Boulevard). Realizing he
was more interesting in his own way than Charo, I called the company to get an
interview, but I was juggled back and forth between the owner (“Is there any
money in this?”) and his son (“We’re very busy!”). It dawned on me that Beverly
Hills is the only community in the world where a plumber needs a press agent.
After days of phone calls, it struck me that Charo’s plumber was harder to meet
than Charo herself.
Lana Turner’s hairdresser, Eric Root (8804 Charleville Boulevard), was
much more cooperative. I’ve been a fan of his ever since reading the Daily Va¬
riety account of Miss Turner’s “rare public Hollywood appearance” at the Artistry
in Cinema banquet of the National Film Society, where she “made a dramatic
entrance on the arm of her young blond hairdresser.” “I think she’s an artiste,”
he told me, explaining that he and Miss Turner travel together but stay in “sep¬
arate bedrooms, thank you.” He does her hair once a week in the salon she had
John Waters
ns
built in her penthouse. “She’s got beautiful hair,” he said. “I just changed her
hairdo; I made it a little fuller. She likes it very close, precise. I softened it up
for ‘Night of i ooo Stars,’ and it went over so well we’re keeping it that way for
a while.” “Are there hairdresser wars?” I asked, wondering if beauticians try to
steal celebrity clients from one another. “No,” he sniffed, “when we go out to¬
gether, we don’t bump into hairdressers"
Much more elusive was Annette Funicello’s garbageman. If you hang out all
Wednesday night, the night she puts out her garbage (16102 Sandy Lane, En-
cino), you might spot him. His boss graciously declined to give out information,
falsely assuming I wanted to look through Annette’s cans. As I trembled with
fear outside her house, looking over my shoulder for the armed security guard
CONTROL that a posted notice on her lawn threatens you with, I sadly realized
that I had missed the pickup and my chance to meet this mysterious trashman.
Oh, well, maybe next trip.
Since visiting celebrity graves is an accepted tourist pastime in Los Angeles,
I wanted to pay my last respects to the ultimate movie star, Francis the Talking
Mule. Mr. Ed may be all the nostalgic rage these days, but Francis was the true
original. Unfortunately, his final resting place is not listed in any guidebook, so
the search for Francis had all the earmarks of a snipe hunt.
Most people I contacted laughed in my face. Even Universal’s press agents
came to a dead end. The Los Angeles SPCA Pet Memorial Park (jo68 Old Scan-
dia Lane) hadn’t a clue (“But we have Hopalong Cassidy’s horse”). The Pet Haven
Cemetery-Crematory (18300 South Figueroa Street) had Jerry Lewis’ and Ava
Gardner’s pets’ graves, but explained that “a mule would be too large for a cre¬
matory.” Wiping away a tear, I made a desperate, dreaded call to the Califor¬
nia Rendering Company, “Buyer of Butcher Scraps, Fat, Bones” (4133 Bandini
Boulevard), and was happy to learn that Francis hadn’t ended up in this glue fac¬
tory. Finally, through the grapevine, I located Donald O’Connor, Francis’ on¬
screen costar. “Knowing the executives at Universal,” he said, “they probably
ate him. There was only one Francis, but he had a stand-in and three stunt mules.
He was kept at the stables at Universal, and I heard he was forty-seven years old
when he died. If you find Francis, let me know. We’ll make another picture to¬
gether.”
Through the help ofthe Directors Guild, I found Francis’ (and Mr. Ed’s) great
director, Arthur Lubin. Knowing that he was vowed to take the secret of how
they made Francis talk with him to the grave, I didn’t let on that Donald
O’Connor had just spilled the beans. (“It didn’t hurt Francis at all,” Mr.
O’Connor had told me. “They had two fish lines that went under the bridle, one
to make him talk, the other to shut him up. There was a piece of lead in his
mouth, and he’d try to spew it out. That’s what made him move his mouth.”)
Mr. Lubin admitted that Mr. Ed was the smarter of his superstars (“Let’s face
776 Hollywood
it, a mule is dumb”), but relieved my anxiety by informing me that after Fran¬
cis’ career was all washed up (“We made five films; they thought that was
enough”), the Humane Society placed him in a good home. Francis died on a
nice ranch somewhere in Jerome, Arizona, a dignified star to the end.
San Francisco may be known as the kook capital of the world, but isn’t L. A. re¬
ally more deserving of that much-coveted title? Think of the infamous crimes
and colorful villains that have helped give this city its exciting reputation. Take
a historical walk down Atrocity Lane and revisit some of the most infamous crime
scenes of the century.
Start your day of touring madness by proceeding to Patty Hearst’ s SLA shoot¬
out scene (1466 East Fifty-fourth Street) in the heart of Watts. Gone is the
charred rubble of the inferno where most of these media guerrillas met their
death, but in its place is a spooky vacant lot that seems the perfect resting ground
for the misguided rebels. The neighbors call it a “tombstone” and predict no one
will ever build on this local battlefield. Across the street at 1447, Mr. Lafayette
McAdory will show you his front door, still riddled with bullet holes, souvenirs
of the shoot-out. Why hasn’t he replaced it? It’s “history,” he said, waking from
a nap on the couch in his garage. Another neighbor told me that the only peo¬
ple he sees snooping around are not tourists but cops, “to show the new ones
where it happened.” Patty Hearst may be a rehabilitated Republican now, but I
wonder if she ever comes back and rides by, in the dead of night, shivering at
the memory of what made her a household word.
Feel like going on a field trip? How about a visit to the Spahn Ranch (12000
Santa Susana Pass Road, Chatsworth), home of the most notorious villains of all
time, the Charles Manson Family. There is nothing left, “not even a scrap,” ac¬
cording to the new owner, but it’s still worth the visit, if only to meditate. And
if you use your imagination and look up into the mountains, you can still pic¬
ture this demented Swiss Family Robinson, hiding out, plotting, about to make
the cover of Life magazine. Make this trip soon, however, because even the grass
won’t be there much longer. Bulldozers are circling, about to eradicate the last
trace of those “fires from hell.” And what next? Tract homes? Spahn Acres? What
about the pieces of ranch hand Shorty Shea’s body, which were supposedly cut
up and buried there? Will God-fearing, middle-class families discover a finger
as they plant gardens in their new housing development?
Across the street, the Faith Evangelical Church is, ironically, under con¬
struction, and they are “quite well aware” of the situation. “We’ve had people
who say there’s a force of evil up there,” a secretary told me over the phone.
Even Gary Wiessner, the church business administrator, said, “The devil’s still
up there. I have felt his presence three times: at the Ethiopia-Somalia border,
the Uganda border and at Spahn.”
John Waters
777
If you want to get really creepy, fast forward to 1985- and start following the
McMartin School child-molestation case. It’s the talk of L.A. The seven defen¬
dants, spanning three generations and charged with 11 g counts of abuse and con¬
spiracy, are despised by the public even more than the Manson Family in its
heyday. An impartial jury is hard to imagine. The school itself (93 1 Manhattan
Beach Boulevard), once very respectable, now sits like an obscene eyesore,
vandalized by the community. The windows have been smashed, and the lawn
dug up for evidence. Graffiti— ray will die (defendant Raymond Buckey), ray
is dead —echoes the city’s lynch-mob attitude. Whatmakesthe scene especially
macabre is the sight of children’s rocking horses swaying in the breeze like
props on the closed-down set of some horror flick.
The pretrial hearing (Judge Aviva K. Bobb’s chambers, Municipal Court, Los
Angeles Traffic Court, 1943 South Hill Street) is expected to last two years, and
it’s easy to get a seat. The McMartin defendants must be on hand every day, and
they look nothing like the modern-day Frankenstein monsters the prosecutor
would have you believe they are. Being open-minded, I had lunch with them. I
have no idea if they’re guilty or not, but they do present their innocence in a
convincing way. Even Virginia McMartin, the seventy-seven-year-old matriarch
of this clan, had a kind word or two. If you don’t hold a cross up to them and
scream, they will at least be friendly. After all, isn’t lunch with the McMartin
defendants more “drop dead” than, say, a lunch with Joan Collins?
Wondering how they could possibly feel, released on bail in their respective
communities, I decided to do a little research. I attended a matinee of The Care
Bear Movie by myself. The ticket seller gave me a funny look, maybe it was my
sunglasses. The usher tore my ticket and snapped, “This is a children’s movie,
you know!” The theater was filled with harried mothers and their kids, many of
whom were clutching Cabbage Patch dolls. I was the only adult male by myself
and people actually moved away from me. I didn’t dare make eye contact. Last¬
ing only twenty minutes or so, I rushed from the theater, filled with anxiety,
understanding a little better how Mrs. McMartin and her pals must feel every
time they step out of the house.
If your vacation time is running out, there are still a few last-minute sights
you may want to squeeze in. Try going to Venice Beach—the only place in Los
Angeles that reminds me of the East Coast. Go directly to Muscle Beach (Ocean
Front Walk between Eighteenth and Nineteenth avenues), but pay no attention
to the pumping-iron showboats who exhibit themselves in a tiny cement arena
surrounded by four tiers of tattered bleachers. Concentrate instead on their au¬
dience, and experience voyeurism of a new kind. Intently watching another
voyeur as he voyeurs an exhibitionist is a thrill you probably won’t get to ex¬
perience at home.
Still feeling kinky? There’s a downtown bar that will have to remain anony¬
mous, but if what I heard is true, it sounds very au courant. Salvadoran sex
778 Hollywood
changes are the main attraction, and in the spirit of LBJ pointing to his scar, these
“girls” will show you their “operations” for $ j.
A s I finally boarded the plane back to Baltimore, I was so filled with the magic
of L.A. I wanted to burst. Ignoring the stewardess’ glare, I searched for an over¬
head compartment to store the “witch’s-broom” (actually a dead palm) I found
at Spahn Ranch. “You had to be there,” I joked to a fellow passenger who quizzed
me about my souvenir. During takeoff, I felt as if I might go insane from hap¬
piness over my wonderful vacation. Not wanting anyone to pop my bubble by
speaking to me, I immediately began reading Lesbian Nuns, and that did the trick.
No one attempted small talk. I had six blissful, silent hours remembering the
heaven of being a tourist in L.A. I should have hijacked the plane and gone back.
Appendix
Sight 8^ Sound
“The Greatest Films of All Time”
Every ten years, starting in 1952 , the authoritative British film magazine Sight
and Sound has polled an international cross section of cineasts and film critics,
to determine the titles of the “ten greatest films of all time.” Every such list is
arbitrary, and many of the films that would be on the personal lists of typical
moviegoers (Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Star Wars) are scorned by the S&J>
voters.
Still, the lists provide a guide to the changing nature of cinematic reputations.
In 1952 , for example, Welles’s Citizen Kane had been so little seen, especially
outside the United States, that it didn’t even make the list. By 1962 the film was
securely in first place, where it has remained ever since.
Starting with the 1992 list, the magazine separated the votes of critics and di¬
rectors. In all the previous lists it combined them.
What is the practical value of such a list? Younger film lovers sometimes want
to know where to start in surveying the great films of the past. My advice is al¬
ways: Start here.
The 1992 List
Critic’s Choices
1. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles
2. La Regie du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), Jean Renoir
3. Tokyo Story, Yasujiro Ozu
4. Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock
5. The Searchers, John Ford
779
78 o
Appendix: The Greatest Films of AH Time
6. (tie) L’Atalante, Jean Vigo; The Passion ofJoan of Arc, Carl Dreyer; Pather
Panchali, Satyajit Ray; Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein
10 . 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick
Director’s Choices
1. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles
2. (tie) Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese, and 8 112, Federico Fellini
4. La Strada, Federico Fellini
5. L’Atalante, Jean Vigo
6. (tie) Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin; The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola;
Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock
9. (tie) Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa; The Passion ofJoan of Arc, Carl Dreyer;
Godfather II, Francis Ford Coppola; Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa
The 1982 List
1. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles
2. La Regie du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), Jean Renoir
3. (tie) Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa; Singin’ in the Rain, Stanley Donen and
Gene Kelly
5. 8 112, Federico Fellini
6. Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein
7. (tie) L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni; The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson
Welles; Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock
10. (tie) The General, Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman; The Searchers, John
Ford
12. (tie) 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick; Andrei Rublev, Andrei
Tarkovsky
14. (tie) Greed, Erich von Stroheim; Jules et Jim, Franfois Truffaut; The Third
Man, Carol Reed
The 1972 List
1. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles
2. La Regie du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), Jean Renoir
3. Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein
7 81
Appendix: The Greatest Films oj All Time
4 .8112, Federico Fellini
5. (tie) L' Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni; Persona, Ingmar Bergman
7. The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl Dreyer
8. (tie) The General, Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman; The Magnificent
Ambersons, Orson Welles
10. (tie) Ugetsu Monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi; Wild Strawberries, Ingmar
Bergman
The 1962 List
1. Citizen Kane, Orson Welles
2. L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni
3. La Regie du Jeu (The Rules of the Game), Jean Renoir
4. (tie) Greed, Erich von Stroheim; Ugetsu Monogatari, Kenji Mizoguchi
6. (tie) Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein; The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio de Sica;
Ivan the Terrible, Sergei Eisenstein
9. La Terra Trema, Luchino Visconti
10. L’Atalante, Jean Vigo
The 1 952 List
1. The Bicycle Thief, Vittorio de Sica
2. (tie) City Lights, Charlie Chaplin; The Gold Rush, Charlie Chaplin
4. Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein
5. (tie) Louisiana Story, Robert Flaherty; Intolerance, D. W. Griffith
7. (tie) Greed, Erich von Stroheim; Le Jour Se Leve, Marcel Came; Passion of Joan
of Arc, Carl Dreyer
10. (tie) Brif Encounter, David Lean; Le Million, Rene Clair; Le Regie de Jeu (The
Rules of the Game), Jean Renoir
Acknowledgments
James Agee, excerpt from A Death in the Family. Copyright © 1957 by The James
Agee Trust, renewed 1985 by Mia Agee. Reprinted with the permission of
Grosset & Dunlap, Inc.
Woody Allen, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” from Playboy (December
1969). Copyright © 1969 by Woody Allen. Reprinted with the permission of
the author.
Nestor Almendros, “Matter of Photogenics” from Projections: A Forum for Film /Waf¬
ers (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). Copyright© 1992 by Nestor Almendros.
Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Nestor Almendros.
Kenneth Anger, excerpt from Hollywood Babylon I (New York: Straight Arrow
Books, 1975). Copyright © 197 j by Kenneth Anger.
Sam Arkoff, excerpt from Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants. Copy¬
right © 1992 by Sam Arkoff. Reprinted with the permission of Citadel
Press/Carol Publishing Group.
Lauren Bacall, excerpt from By Myself. Copyright © 1978 by Caprigo, Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Djuna Bames, John Bunny interview from Interviews, edited with commentary
by Douglas Messerli, pp. 119—1 24. Copyright © 1985 by Sun & Moon Press.
Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
783
784 Acknowledgments
Andre Bazin, “The Western; Or the American Film Par Excellence” from What
Is Cinema?, Volume II, edited by Hugh Gray. Copyright © 1967 by The Regents
of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of University of
California Press.
Robert Benchley, “Movie Boners” from My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They
Grew, illustrated by Gluyas Williams. Copyright 1936 by Robert C. Benchley,
renewed © 1964 by Gertrude Benchley. Reprinted with the permission of
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Ingmar Bergman, excerpt from The Magic Lantern, translated by Joan Tate.
Copyright © 1987 by Ingmar Bergman. English translation copyright ©1988
by Joan Tate. Reprinted with the permission of Viking Penguin, a division of
Penguin Books USA Inc.
Jeremy Bernstein excerpt from Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick’s 2001
(New York: New American Library, 1970). Reprinted with the permission of
the author.
Robert Bloch, “The Movie People” from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fic¬
tion (1969). Copyright © 1969 by Robert Bloch. Reprinted with the permis¬
sion of the author’s estate and the author’s agent, Ricia Mainhardt, New York,
New York.
Peter Bogdanovich, “Bogie in Excelsis” from Esquire (September 1964). Copy¬
right © 1964 by Peter Bogdanovich. Reprinted with the permission of the au¬
thor.
Joe Bonomo, excerpt from The Strongman: A True Life Pictorial Autobiography of
the Hercules of the Screen, Joe Bonomo (New York: Bonomo Studios, 196 8). Copy¬
right © 1968 by Joe Bonomo.
Louise Brooks, excerpts from “Pabstand Lulu” from Lulu in Hollywood. Copy¬
right © 1974, 198 2 by Louise Brooks. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred
A. Knopf, Inc.
Kevin Brownlow, excerpts from The Parade’s Gone By. . . . Copyright © 1968
by Kevin Brownlow. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Charles Bukowski, excerpt from Hollywood. Copyright © 1989 by Charles
Bukowski. Reprinted with the permission of Black Sparrow Press.
Acknowledgments
ns
Luis Bunuel, excerpts from “Surrealism” from My Last Sigh, translated by Abi¬
gail Israel. English translation copyright © 1983 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of the publishers.
Truman Capote, “A Beautiful Child” from Mu sic for Chameleons. Copyright ©
1975, 1977, 1979, 1980 by Truman Capote. Reprinted with the permission of
Random House, Inc.
William Castle, excerpt from Step Right Up. Copyright © 1976 by William Cas¬
tle. Reprinted with the permission of The Putnam Publishing Group.
Blaise Cendrars, “If You Want to Make Movies” from Hollywood: Mecca of the
Movies, translated and edited by Jean Guerin. Copyright © 1995 by The Regents
of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of University of
California Press and Editions Grasset et Fasquelle.
Raymond Chandler, excerpts from Selected Letters. Copyright © 1981 by Col¬
lege Trustees, Ltd. Reprinted with the permission of Ed Victor, Ltd.
Charlie Chaplin, excerpt from My Autobiography. Copyright © 1964 by Charles
Chaplin. Reprinted with the permission of The Bodley Head, Ltd.
Marcelle Clements, “You Can’t Take That Away from Me: Fred Astaire as
Metaphor” from The Dog Is Us and Other Observations (New York: Viking Pen¬
guin, 1985). Originally in Revue 1, no. 3, Holiday edition (December 1980).
Copyright © 19 8 o b y Marcelle Clements. Reprinted with the permission o f the
author and Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Alistair Cooke, “Valentino” from A Mencken Chrestomathy. Copyright 1927 by Al¬
fred A. Knopf, Inc., renewed © 1955 by H. L. Mencken. Reprinted with the
permission of the publisher.
Eleanor Coppola, excerpts from Notes (Limelight Editions). Copyright ©1979
by Eleanor Coppola. Reprinted with the permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc.
for the author.
Quentin Crisp, Introduction from How to Go to the Movies. Copyright © 1989 by
Quentin Crisp. Reprinted with the permission of St. Martin’s Press, Inc.
Joan Didion, “John Wayne: A Love Song” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Copyright© 1965, 1968 by Joan Didion. Reprinted with the permission of Far¬
rar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
7 86
Ackno wledgments
Manny Farber, “Underground Films” from Negative Space (New York: Praeger,
1971). Copyright © 1971 by Manny Farber. Reprinted with the permission of
the author.
Federico Fellini, excerpt from Fellini on Fellini. Copyright © 1976. Reprinted
with the permission of Diogenes Verlag AG+ and Faber and Faber, Ltd.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Crazy Sunday” from The Short Stories oJF. Scott Fitzgerald.
Copyright 193 2 by American Mercury, Inc., renewed © 1960 by Frances Scott
Fitzgerald Smith. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon
& Schuster, Inc.
E. M. Forster, Prefatory Note from Abinger Harvest. Copyright 1936 and renewed
© 1964 by Edward M. Forster. Reprinted with the permission of Harcourt Brace
& Company, King’s College, Cambridge, and The Society of Authors as the lit¬
erary representatives of the E. M. Forster Estate.
Libby Gelman-Waxner, “Libby Noir” from If You Ask Me. Copyright © 1994 by
Libby Gelman-Waxner. Reprinted with the permission of St. Martin’s Press,
Inc.
Brendan Gill, “Blue Notes” from The New Yorker (January 2, 1973). Copyright
© 1 97 3 by Brendan Gill. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Interview with Buster Keaton by John Gillett and James Blue, from Sight and
Sound: A Fftieth Anniversary Selection (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). Copy¬
right © 1982. Reprinted with the permission of Sight and Sound, British Film In¬
stitute.
Simon Gleave with Jason Forrest, “Frequently Asked Questions about Quentin
Tarantino” (1996). Reprinted with the permission of Simon Gleave.
Graham Greene, “Memoirs of a Film Critic” from The Graham Greene Film Reader:
Reviews, Essays, Interviews, and Film Stories, edited by David Parkinson. Copyright
© 199 3. Reprinted with the permission of Applause Theatre Books and Inter¬
national Creative Management.
Ben Hecht, excerpts from A Child of the Century. Copyright 1953 by Ben Hecht.
Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Ben Hecht.
Acknowledgments
787
Alfred Hitchcock, “My Own Methods” from Sight and Sound: A Fiftieth Anniver¬
sary Selection (London: Faber and Faber, 1982). Copyright© 1982. Reprinted
with the permission of Sight and Sound, British Film Institute.
Bob Hope with Bob Thomas, excerpt from The Road to Hollywood. Copyright ©
1977 by Bob Hope. Reprinted with the permission of Doubleday, a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
John Houseman, excerpt from Run-through (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1972). Copyright © 1972 by John Houseman. Reprinted with the permission
of Joan Houseman and the Robert Lantz-Joy Harris Literary Agency, Inc.
John Huston, excerpt from An Open Book. Copyright © 1980 by John Huston.
Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Christopher Isherwood, excerpt from Prater Violet. Copyright 194 j and re¬
newed © 197 3 by Christopher Isherwood. Reprinted with the permission of Far¬
rar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Alva Johnstone, “The Wahoo Boy” from Profiles from The New Yorker (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938). Originally published in The New Yorker (1934).
Copyright 19 34 by F-R Publishing Company.
Pauline Kael, “Tango” from Reeling (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976). Copyright
© 1976 by Pauline Kael. Reprinted with the permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, excerpt from Another Day in the Life. Copyright © 1987,
1976 by Ryszard Kapuscinski. Reprinted with the permission of Harcourt Brace
& Company.
Stanley Kauffmann, “Why I’m Not Bored” from Before My Eyes: Film, Criticism &l
C omment (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). Originally published in The New
Republic. Copyright © 1974 by Stanley Kauffmann. Reprinted with the permis¬
sion of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc.
Klaus Kinski, excerpt from Kinski Uncut, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Copyright © 1996 by Genevieve and Nanhoi Nakszynski. Reprinted with the
permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.
John Kobal, “Mae West”from People Will Talk. Copyright © 1986 by The Kobal
Collection, Ltd. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
788 Acknowledgments
Howard Koch, excerpts from As Time Goes By: Memoirs of a Writer (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1979). Copyright © 1979 by Howard Koch. Reprinted with
the permission of Anne Koch.
Akira Kurosawa, selections from Something Like an Autobiography, translated by
Audie E. Bock. Copyright © 1982 by Akira Kurosawa. Reprinted with the per¬
mission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Spike Lee with Lisa Jones, excerpt from Do the Right Thing. Copyright ©1989
by Spike Lee. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Janet Leigh with Christopher Nickens, excerpt from Psycho: Behind the Scenes of
the Classic Thriller. Copyright © 1995 by Janet Leigh and Christopher Nickens.
Reprinted with the permission of Harmony Books, a division of Crown Pub¬
lishers, Inc.
Elmore Leonard, excerpt from Get Shorty. Copyright © 1990 by Elmore
Leonard, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Dell Books, a division of Ban¬
tam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. Inc.
Oscar Levant, excerpts from The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (New York: G. P. Put-
nam’sSons, 1965). Copyright© 1965 by Oscar Levant. Reprinted with the per¬
mission of Gary N. DaSilva.
Dwight Macdonald, excerpt from Dwight Macdonald on Movies. Copyright ©
1969 by Dwight Macdonald. Reprinted with the permission of Michael Mac¬
donald.
Norman Mailer, “Tango, Last Tango.” Copyright © 1982 by Norman Mailer.
Reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.
David Mamet, “The Tasks of a Director” from Directing Film. Copyright © 1991
by David Mamet. Reprinted with the permission of Viking Penguin, a division
of Penguin Books USA Inc.
Groucho Marx, excerpts from The Groucho Letters. Copyright © 1967 by Grou-
cho Marx. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Terry McMillan, “The Wizard of Oz” from David Rosenberg, ed., The Movie That
Changed My Life (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991). Copyright © 1991 by
Terry McMillan. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Acknowledgments
789
Larry McMurtry, excerpts from The Last Picture Show. Copyright © 19 8 9 by Larry
McMurtry. Reprinted with the permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam
Doubleday Dell Publishing Group. Inc.
Carey McWilliams, “The Island of Hollywood.” Copyright 1946 by Carey
McWilliams. Reprinted with the permission of Iris McWilliams.
R. K. Narayan, “A Horse and Two Goats” from The Bachelor of Arts. Copyright
1937 by Rasipuram Krishnaswamier Narayanaswami. Reprinted with the per¬
mission of The University of Chicago Press, William Heinemann, Ltd., and Sheil
Land Associates.
Geoffrey O’Brien, excerpt from The Phantom Empire. Copyright © 1993 by
Geoffrey O’Brien. Reprinted with the permission of W. W. Norton & Com¬
pany, Inc.
Mark O’Donnell, “‘The Laws of Cartoon Motion’” from Elementary Education:
An Easy Alternative to Actual Learning. Copyright © 1983^ by Mark O’Donnell.
Reprinted with the permission of the author and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
John O’Hara, letter to David Brown from The Selected Letters of John O’Hara (New
York: Random House, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by United States Trust Com¬
pany of New York, as Trustee of the Will of John O’Hara. Reprinted with the
permission of United States Trust Company of New York.
Walker Percy, excerpts from The Moviegoer. Copyright © i960 by Walker
Percy. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
S. J. Perelman, “I’m Sorry I Made Me Cry” from TheRoadto Miltown (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1957). Originally appeared in The New Yorker (1952). Copy¬
right © 19J2 by S. J. Perelman. Reprinted with the permission of Harold Ober
Associates, Inc.
Julia Phillips, excerpt from You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Copyright
© 1991 by Julia Phillips. Reprinted with the permission of Random House, Inc.
Michael Powell, excerpt from A Life in Movies: An Autobiography (London: William
Heinemann, 1987). Copyright © 1987 by Michael Powell. Reprinted with the
permission of Reed Consumer Books, Ltd.
Mario Puzo, excerpt from The Godfather. Copyright © 1969 by Mario Puzo.
Reprinted with the permission of The Putnam Publishing Group.
79 ° Acknowledgments
Anthony Quinn, “Neo-Realist Cowboys” from One Man Tango. Copyright ©
1 99 S by Anthony Quinn. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Pub¬
lishers, Inc.
Nicholas Ray, “James Dean: The Actor as a Young Man” from Susan Ray, ed.,
I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Kay on Making Movies. Copyright © 1993 by The Re¬
gents of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of Susan
Ray and the University of California Press.
Satyajit Ray, “A Long Time on the Little Road” from Our Films, Their Films. Copy¬
right © 1976, 1994 by Orient Longman Limited (India) and Merchant-Ivory Pro¬
ductions, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Hyperion.
Rex Reed, “Ava: Life in the Afternoon” from Do You Sleep in the Nude (New York:
New American Library, 1968). Copyright © 1968 by Rex Reed. Reprinted with
the permission of the author.
Jean Renoir, “D. W. Griffith” and “Le Regie du Jeu-1939” from My Life and My
Films, translated by Norman Denny. Copyright © 1974 by Jean Renoir. English
translation copyright © i974by Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., and Atheneum
Publishers, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon
& Schuster, Inc.
Donald Ritchie, “Setsuko Hara” from Japanese Film: Art and History. Copyright ©
198 2 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted with the permission of the pub¬
lishers.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Rocky Horror Playtime vs. Shopping Mall Home” from
Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. Copyright © 199 £ by The Regents of the Uni¬
versity of California. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Cali¬
fornia Press.
Lillian Ross, excerpt from “Picture” from Takes: StoriesfromThe Talk of the Town
(New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983). Originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Copyright © 1960 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. Reprinted with the per¬
mission of the author.
Mike Royko, “Belushi’s OK, But. . .” from Like I Was Sayin ' (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1984). Copyright © 1984 by Mike Royko. Reprinted with the per¬
mission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
Acknowledgments
79
Andrew Sarris, excerpt from Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema 1955—1969
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970). Copyright © 1970 by Andrew Sarris.
Reprinted with the permission of the author.
Delmore Schwartz, excerpt from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Copyright ©
196 1 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions
Publishing Corporation.
Martin Scorsese, excerpt from Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by David Thompson
and Ian Christie. Copyright © 1990. Reprinted with the permission of Faber
and Faber, Ltd.
Sight and Sound Best Movies of All Time Decade Polls. Reprinted with the per¬
mission of Sight and Sound, British Film Institute.
Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster” from Against Interpretation. Copy¬
right © 1966 and renewed 1994 by Susan Sontag. Reprinted with the permis¬
sion of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Robert Stone, “Of Light” (excerpt) from Children of Light. Copyright © 1985",
1986 by Robert Stone. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Preston Sturges, excerpt from Preston Sturges by Anne and Tom Sturges. Copy¬
right © 1990 by Anne Sturges. Reprinted with the permission of Simon &
Schuster, Inc.
Andrei Tarkovsky, excerpt from Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema,
translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. Copyright © 1987 by Andrei Tarkovsky.
Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Robert Lewis Taylor, excerpts from W. C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes (New
York: Signet, 1967). Copyright 1949, © 1967 by Robert Lewis Taylor.
David Thomson, “Norma Desmond” and “Rick Blaine” from Suspects. Copyright
© 1985 by David Thomson. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc.
Michael Tolkin, excerpt from The Player. Copyright© 1988 by Michael Tolkin.
Reprinted with the permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
792
Acknowledgments
Frangois Truffaut, “Orson Welles, Citizen Kane: The Fragile Giant” and “James
Dean Is Dead” from The Films in My Life, translated by Leonard Mayhew. Copy¬
right © 197 5 by Flammarion. English translation copyright © 1978 by Simon
& Schuster. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parker Tyler, “The Awful Fate of the Sex Goddess” from The Meaning of Film.
Copyright © 1969 by Parker Tyler. Reprinted with the permission of Collier
Associates.
Kenneth Tynan, excerptfrom Show People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).
Copyright © 1979 by Kenneth Tynan. Reprinted with the permission of Rox-
ane Tynan.
John Updike, “Suzie Creamcheese Speaks” from Hugging the Shore. Copyright ©
1983 by John Updike. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Gore Vidal, excerpt from Hollywood. Copyright © 1990 by Gore Vidal.
Reprinted with the permission of Random House, Inc.
Gore Vidal, “Who Makes the Movies” from The Second American Revolution and
Other Essays (1976—1982). Copyright© 1982 by Gore Vidal. Reprinted with the
permission of Random House, Inc.
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, excerptfrom POPism: The Warhol 6o’s. Copyright
© 19 8 o by Andy Warhol. Reprinted with the the permission of Harcourt Brace
& Company.
Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” from The Immediate Experience
(New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1970). Copyright © 1962 by Joseph Gold¬
berg. Reprinted with the permission of Paul Warshow.
John Waters, “John Waters’ Tour of L. A.” from Crackpot: The Obsessions of John
Waters (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1986). Copyright© 1986 by John Wa¬
ters. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Everett Weinberger, excerpts from Wannabe. Copyright © 199? by Everett
Weinberger. Reprinted with the permission of Citadel Press/Carol Publishing
Group.
Nathanael West, excerpt from Day of the Locust. Copyright 1939 by the Estate
of Nathanael West. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publish¬
ing Corporation.
Acknowledgments
793
Tom Wolfe, “Loverboy of the Bourgeoisie” from The Kandy-Koloied Tangerine-
Flake Streamline Baby. Copyright © 1964 and renewed 1993 by Thomas K.
Wolfe, Jr. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of each of the se¬
lections. Rights holders of any selection not credited should contact W. W. Nor¬
ton & Company, Inc., goo Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 1 o 110, in order for a
correction to be made in the next reprinting of our work.
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11